grahamsh said:
Alleged tank training area in Ningxia....in mainstream Oz media..
The mysterious man-made landscape recently "discovered" by eagle-eyed Google Earth spotters in a remote part of China is almost certainly a tank training ground.
The Beijing correspondent for The Sydney Morning and The Age, Mary-Anne Toy, contacted authorities in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region - where the landscape is situated - on Friday.
She was told that the facility was used for putting tanks and their drivers through their paces and that the installation had been there for seven or eight years.
Situated near the town of Huangyangtan, the installation has many features which identify it as a military complex, including a communications tower and a watch tower. It also is situated nearby what looks like an artillery range.
Behind the main building, there is what appears to be a large area where numerous trucks - or tank carriers - are parked.
Although it is difficult to distinguish any tanks, there are several large red-roofed structures in what looks like a massive parking lot where tanks could be housed.
Huangyangtan is about 35km south-west of the provincial capital of Yinchuan, making it unlikely that this is some top secret military establishment.
According to comparative data gathered by members of the Google Earth community, the rectangular landscape bears an uncanny resemblance to 450 kilometres of territory occupied by China, but claimed by India, in the Karakoram mountain range.
The Huangyangtan site has a three-kilometre perimeter.
Launched last year, the Google Earth site became the first to offer users free access to satellite images covering many parts of the globe. In some areas you can see people sitting by swimming pools or walking the streets.
The service has spawned a devoted group of followers who spend their time, scouring the images for interesting or unusual natural and man-made features.
More on this here - although members are maybe aware or involved already !
On the internet, a little mystery can go a long way.
Six weeks ago, a man living in Germany and calling himself KenGrok, announced a fascinating discovery on a Google Earth Community forum.
Poring over satellite images of China on the free Google Earth service, he came across a strange plot of land - approximately 900 metres by 700 metres, about the size of six Sydney Cricket Grounds.
The land, which KenGrok said was landscape that had been modelled for military purposes, is situated near the town of Huangyangtan about 35 kilometres from Yinchuan, the capital of the autonomous region of Ningxia, in northern China.
Nearby, there is a substantial facility complete with rows of red-roofed buildings, scores of what look to be military trucks and a large compound with elevated lookout posts and a large communications tower.
The land was contoured in a way that was out of sync with the surrounding countryside.
It appeared to be a mountainous region, complete with snow-capped peaks and glacial valleys dotted with numerous lakes.
Yet this piece of land was slap bang in the middle of a largely arid area due west of the rich alluvial plains bordering the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
A fellow Google Earth enthusiast suggested that the topography indicated that this was probably a model of land on one of China's frontiers.
KenGrok went looking and two weeks later came back with the answer. The swatch was a scale model of 157,500 square kilometres of territory in and around China's Aksai Chin border region that abuts India and Pakistan.
The scale is exactly 500:1.
Tim Brown, a senior fellow specialising in satellite imagery analysis at GlobalSecurity.org, said it was one of the more intriguing discoveries he had come across.
He said that, while he was aware of military trainers using terrain models, these were mostly only on a much smaller scale.
"These days, while terrain modelling is not completely obsolete, they do rely much more on computer-based simulation," he said.
That's not to say that the Chinese, with their vast pool of manpower, have scrapped the practice.
Last week a reader posted a link on our own MashUp blog that led to a Chinese site - wforum.com - where in late July a reader posted a photo showing men in blue overalls on what looks to be another large-scale terrain model.
The caption does not clearly state where or when the photo was taken but it is watermarked "Xinhua" - the New China News Agency, China's state-run new agency.
Although the land on which the model is based is Chinese territory, it is also claimed by India. The two sides fought a brief war over the area in 1962.
Covering an area the size of Switzerland, the Aksai Chin region is a high altitude desert plateau. It contains a strategically important highway 219 that connects the far north-western province of Xinjiang with Tibet.
While that explained what this man-made landscape was, it didn't explain why there was a need to construct such an elaborate model about 2400 kilometres to the east.
In the ensuing month, debate and discussion has raged across the length and breadth of the world wide web.
The story has been reported across the world in many languages by bloggers and news websites. It's become the topic of discussion on forums, blogs and bulletin boards.
Everyone from conspiracy theorists to model railway enthusiasts has joined in the debate, marvelling at the size and complexity of the structure and speculating as to its purpose.
Among the many theories doing the rounds are that the model is:
:: A navigation/gunnery training area where drones drop small flour or paint bombs in an exercise to simulate trajectories and dispersal patterns.
:: A model of the catchment areas of China's major river systems, simulating the effects of climate change.
:: A model to study the dispersal patterns for chemical or biological weapons.
:: A large-scale mini putt-putt course.
The Indian Express newspaper website last week quoted an unnamed Indian officer who had served in the region as saying that, while the military was aware that the Chinese had training facilities to prepare its forces in the event of an outbreak of hostilities in the disputed region, "the scale and detail is something new to us".
Still the mystery remains unsolved. Why is it there? How long has it been there? And how is it used?
When the Beijing correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age contacted local officials last month, she was told that the area was a tank training facility that had been there for seven or eight years.
But this theory is dismissed by GlobalSecurity.org's Tim Brown, who said that the scale of the model was just too small.
Moreover, as the actual land that the model represents is on a plateau 5000 metres above sea level, it would make tank warfare difficult if not impossible.
However, he did say there was evidence of a live fire range and a tank training course further to the north of the terrain model.
Brown said that the facility was unlikely to be a holdover from the 1962 conflict. He pointed out the lack of vegetation around the base, indicating that it was only recently constructed.
The size of the model also means that it is unsuitable for training pilots - unless they use it as a walk-through terrain visualisation training exercise.
All of which lead Brown to speculate that the model is all about what he calls "perception management".
"It could be that it's just there as a morale builder, " he said. "I mean, look, even I'm impressed by what they've done."
