Lost in a Maze of Abandoned Stations Beneath the Streets of Barcelona

Lost in a Maze of Abandoned Stations Beneath the Streets of Barcelona

The always interesting urban exploration crew at Trackrunners have assembled all of their various trips down beneath the streets of Barcelona into one long super-post, an epic catalog of all things lost and subterranean in that Spanish coastal city.

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Berlin Is Threatened From Below By Its Rising Water Table

Berlin Is Threatened From Below By Its Rising Water Table

While the American West stumbles forward into an already dangerous drought —and it’s barely even summer—Berliners are simply not using enough water. This means that the city’s water table is now on the rise, and it’s beginning to threaten the city’s buildings from below. Some basements have already been affected.

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How Huge Subterranean Grids Could Protect Cities From Earthquakes

How Huge Subterranean Grids Could Protect Cities From Earthquakes

French engineers have been experimenting with a technique that could redirect seismic energy away from structures such as cities, dams, and nuclear power plants, sparing them from damage. It involves digging large, cylindrical boreholes into the ground, forming a defensive geometry of lace-like arrays that, researchers hope, could deflect seismic waves and thus make whole landscapes "invisible" to earthquakes.

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Inside the DIY World of Mapping Caves With Radio

Inside the DIY World of Mapping Caves With Radio

Underground, where this is no GPS and certainly no Wi-Fi, mapping caves requires a different kind of technical ingenuity. Thus, there is cave radio. To learn about the DIY world of cave radio and underground exploration, Gizmodo picked the brain of Stanley Sides, tinkerer and former president of the Cave Research Foundation.

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The New Budapest Metro Line Is an Awesome Psychedelic Trip

The New Budapest Metro Line Is an Awesome Psychedelic Trip

After ten years of extremely expensive, slow, and politically messed up construction work–it is a long and sad story of government corruption and incompetence–Budapest, the Hungarian capital, got its fourth metro line today. Despite its ill-fated genesis and controversial usefulness, the Metro 4 is an amazing engineering, architectural, and artistic achievement, a mix of stunning concrete structures and trippy ornamentation. It looks stunning.

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Explore More Than 3,000 Miles of Tunnels Beneath Montreal

Explore More Than 3,000 Miles of Tunnels Beneath Montreal

Andrew Emond, a Montreal-based photographer, amateur geographer, and DIY gonzo spelunker of the city’s sewers and lost rivers, has just re-launched his excellent website, Under Montreal. The revamped site now comes complete with a fascinating, interactive map of the city’s subterranean streams, documenting Montreal’s invisible rivers for all to see.

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I stumbled on this photo while writing last night’s post about the East Side Access Project in New Y

I stumbled on this photo while writing last night’s post about the East Side Access Project in New York and just couldn’t resist: like some underground rail gun or a particle accelerator whirring to life, this is part of the Second Avenue Subway, the so-called "86th Street Cavern," a subterranean wonder that will soon be indistinguishable from mere infrastructure, captured by MTA photographer Rehema Trimiew. [MTA]

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A Colossal Yellow Cave Taking Shape Beneath Manhattan

A Colossal Yellow Cave Taking Shape Beneath Manhattan

NYC’s East Side Access Project continues apace, and these recent images, taken last month by MTA photographer Rehema Trimiew, show a whole new view of the mind-boggling underground caverns now being constructed beneath Manhattan. From raw walls of exposed geology to this, the space is finally taking on the look and feel of architecture.

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Training for Underground Warfare at a Nuclear Weapons Complex in Texas

Training for Underground Warfare at a Nuclear Weapons Complex in Texas

In the early, angst-filled days of the Cold War, miners starting carving the insides out of a hill between Dallas and Austin, Texas. The workers didn’t know what they were building, but—at 7,000 acres—it was huge. At that point in time, it was only known as "Project 76."

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This Giant Mechanical Earthworm Is Fixing D.C.'s Poop Problem

This Giant Mechanical Earthworm Is Fixing D.C.'s Poop Problem

Washington D.C. is overflowing with crap—and not just the sort spewed in Congress. Rather, its ancient sewage system regularly overflows, sending a literal river of poo into the city’s waterways. Lady Bird is the name of the giant tunneling machine sent to stop it.

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