Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges

Industry & Mega-Builds

Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges is a journalist specializing in construction, mining, and large engineering and infrastructure projects. She has written hundreds of articles on the megaprojects and industrial works reshaping the modern world. At Watts & Wild she covers heavy industry and mega-builds: dams, tunnels, data centers, factories, offshore platforms, and the record-breaking engineering behind them.

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Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges

Recent articles

The world's largest iceberg sat stuck on the seabed for over 30 years, then broke free and drifted a trillion tonnes of ice toward an island of two million penguins, where it is now shattering apart

Denmark just sank the first of 89 giant concrete tubes into the Baltic Sea to build the world's longest immersed tunnel, which will turn a 45 minute ferry to Germany into a 7 minute train ride

Engineers pulled four dams off the Klamath River in the largest dam removal in US history, and within ten days salmon were swimming into habitat that had been blocked to them for over a century

China built the world's first commercial gravity battery, a 148-metre tower that stores electricity by stacking 35-tonne blocks made from coal ash and old wind turbine blades, and is now building eight more

The world's largest electric ship is a passenger ferry built to carry 2,100 people across the river between Argentina and Uruguay, running on 250 tonnes of batteries instead of a drop of diesel

China just switched on the world's first gigawatt-hour flow battery, storing its power in tanks of liquid vanadium that cannot catch fire and are built to last 30 years

Big Tech is restarting a dead nuclear reactor to feed its AI, with Microsoft paying to bring 835 megawatts back online at Three Mile Island after six years dark

China opened the world's longest expressway tunnel on December 26, 2025, a 22.13 kilometer bore through the Tianshan Mountains that cuts an hours-long crossing to about 20 minutes

China opened the world's highest bridge in Guizhou on September 28, 2025, its deck soaring 625 meters above the Beipan River, nearly nine times the height of the Golden Gate

Climeworks switched on Mammoth, the world's largest carbon-sucking plant designed for 36,000 tonnes a year, but in its first ten months it verifiably removed about 105

New York just finished a 111 million dollar living seawall off Staten Island, a 2,400 foot chain of eight stone reefs built to grow oysters and break storm waves

China has begun building a 137 billion dollar megadam in the Himalayas that will generate three times the power of the Three Gorges, and two countries downstream are worried