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Artificial Mountains

atlasobscura.com

40 pointsThevet15 comments

When you enter Seoul from the airport by bus, you see a couple of flat-topped hills across the river next to the World Cup soccer stadium. They're about 100 meters tall and just over 2 kilometers from end to end. You wouldn't find anything unusual about them if you weren't used to the Korean landscape -- there are no naturally flat-topped hills around here -- but that's the old garbage dump for this city with a population of 10 million.

They surrounded the garbage with concrete walls to prevent wastewater from leaking into the river, poured a thick layer of soil on top of it, planted trees, and built walkways. Now it's a public park. The underlying garbage still emits methane, which is collected and burned to power the adjacent soccer stadium and other facilities.

We humans made these mountains of crap ourselves. We might not have the budget and/or political will to remove them, but we do have the capacity to make them look significantly less crappy, and perhaps even useful, if we want to.

There's a similar hill close to where I live, not nearly as big though. There's just some grass on it and I see some dump trucks / excavators on there from time to time, but otherwise I think it's not being used.

-In Norway, they one-upped that - the (now defunct) Røros copper mines operated for more than 300 years, and the spoil dumps from the processing are quite the sight [0]

Rather than tidying them up, though, they were put on the UNESCO world heritage list. (Along with the rest of the municipality of Røros; the mining museum is well worth a visit if you have an interest in industrial history and happen to find yourself in central Norway for some reason or the other.)

[0] https://lokalhistoriewiki.no/images/Slagghaugene_p%C3%A5_R%C...

Though it's hill-sized not mountain-sized, there is Silbury Hill in England

"The largest artificial mound in Europe, mysterious Silbury Hill compares in height and volume to the roughly contemporary Egyptian pyramids. Probably completed in around 2400 BC, it apparently contains no burial. Though clearly important in itself, its purpose and significance remain unknown."

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/silbury-hil...

> Outsider artist Leonard Knight built Salvation Mountain in Niland, California out of concrete, sand, and accumulated junk. He used so much salvaged paint to cover it with brightly colored religious messages that the county declared the site a “toxic nightmare” due to the amount of lead in the soil and considered dismantling the mountain and hauling it to a toxic waste dump.

How does someone get to build such a mountain without anyone taking notice and considering the impact? You need a permit to extend your porch but nobody looks more carefully at someone building such an artificial mountain? I understand that when powerful economic and political interests are concerned some of these worries will be artificially dismissed but this doesn't appear to be one of those cases.

It's in the middle of nowhere. Niland, CA is 5 miles away and has a population of 1000. Not going to have a lot of NIMBY activity there.

Niland, a.k.a. 'Slab City' is a ghost town on the edge of the Salton Sea. People who live there are all outsiders who live in huts or RVs.

Niland is an unincorporated area, so there's no city, and he probably never asked the county for a permit. Without a complaint, the county department won't investigate, they have too much to do. And what asshole goes to make a complaint for artwork.

It's on or near and long demolished army base that for decades no jurisdiction wanted to take responsibility for. Also the local culture is western desert rats and ranchers. Which are adverse to getting in other people business.

It's nice to see that they (briefly) mention the half-jokingly proposed artificial mountain in the infamously flat Netherlands [1] towards the end of the article.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Berg_Komt_Er

On a smaller scale, the highest hill in Berlin is man-made[0](out of leftover rubble) and was recently superseded by another hill which grew because waste was added to it.[1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkenberge

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio

"is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of testae, fragments of broken ancient Roman pottery, nearly all discarded amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire"

"It has a circumference of nearly a kilometre (0.6 mi) and stands 35 metres (115 ft) high, though it was probably considerably higher in ancient times."

Thank you, that was a great read.

If you exit Indian Capital New Delhi by Road towards Haryana, somewhere at border you will see two hills with lots of trucks, bulldozers, people working on them on the other side of river. Those hills are entirely made of Garbage from the city. And yes, it stinks in Summer and/or Rains.

Recently I was reading about the Aberfan Disaster in Wales. A huge coal spoil heap slipped and destroyed a school in 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

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