Dubai, The Palm Islands

I must admit that few things truly amaze me in this world. But this does. I caught a Megastructures (Discovery Channel I think) episode the other day about Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, U.A.E.

I'm just blown away. This is honestly one of the wonders of the modern world. The fact that we have the engineering capability to build something like this is amazing.

Their plans for the new islands now that they've proved they can do it are simply staggering. And all of this has been in the past four years. It's freaking crazy. There's a lot of info out there about it, but here are some links.

This isn't exactly new news, but it was new to me and I'm truely amazed.

http://www.thepalm.ae/
http://realestate.theemiratesnetwork.com/developments/dubai/palm_islands.php
http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/dubaiaerials&page=2

 

Not sure about the world population, but a nice place to visit

Just a little reason on why they are doing this. As you may or may not know, the United Arab Emirates is a very small country and amazingly wealthy due to the oil it sits on. However, they anticipate that the oil will run out in 2016 crushing the economy of the country.

The prince decided that while they had the money to do something about it they would. So he envisioned turning Dubai into one of the worlds premier tourist destinations. To do that, he decided to build an island shaped like a palm tree. Since Dubai only has something like 40 miles of coastline they didn't have enough room to build up along the coast, so they made this Island. Now there are plans for three or four more islands since this one is working out so well.