Industry

Industry & Mega-Builds

Dams, tunnels, bridges, reactors and data centers, the record-breaking engineering reshaping the modern world.

The portal of the Zojila tunnel cut into a snowy Himalayan mountainside with a road leading in

Industry & Mega-Builds

Engineers just broke through the Zojila tunnel, taming one of the world's deadliest mountain passes

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of white wind turbines of the SunZia wind farm across a wide New Mexico desert

Industry & Mega-Builds

America's largest clean energy project just switched on, eighteen years after it was first dreamed up

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

A vast modern semiconductor chip factory complex spread across the desert near Phoenix

Industry & Mega-Builds

The factory making the tiny brains behind the AI boom is now rising in the Arizona desert

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The tapering Jeddah Tower under construction rising far above a hazy desert city

Industry & Mega-Builds

After years frozen half-built, the world's first kilometre-high tower is climbing again in Saudi Arabia

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

The huge circular cutterhead of a tunnel boring machine underground studded with cutting discs

Industry & Mega-Builds

A machine longer than a city block just started chewing a tunnel deep beneath Sydney Harbour

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Rows of huge white offshore wind turbines standing in the Atlantic Ocean under a bright sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

America's largest offshore wind farm is rising 27 miles off Virginia Beach, one giant turbine at a time

By Bruno Teles · July 4, 2026

Elisha Otis demonstrating his safety elevator, standing on an open platform high above a crowd in a grand 1854 exhibition hall as an assistant prepares to cut the rope

Industry & Mega-Builds

A man stood on a high platform, had an axe cut the only rope holding him up, and did not fall, and that stunt made the modern city possible

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The great stone portal entrance of the Hoosac Tunnel set into a wooded Massachusetts mountainside in the 1870s, railroad tracks leading in

Industry & Mega-Builds

A tunnel that took a quarter of a century and 200 lives to drive through a mountain was a triumph of engineering and a slaughterhouse at once

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The White City of the 1893 World's Fair, grand white neoclassical palaces around a long reflecting basin with a golden statue, crowds strolling

Industry & Mega-Builds

America fell in love with a gleaming white city of the future in 1893, and almost none of it was real or meant to last

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

An 1890s electric streetcar entering the tiled tunnel portal of the new Tremont Street Subway in Boston, the first subway in America

Industry & Mega-Builds

Long before New York, a city choking on its own streetcars dug the first subway in America, tunnelling under a historic park and its old graves while frightened riders wondered what waited below

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Eads Bridge with its long steel arches spanning the wide Mississippi River at St Louis, stone piers rising from the water

Industry & Mega-Builds

A self-taught engineer who had never built a bridge spanned the mighty Mississippi with an untried metal, silenced the doubters with an elephant, and the result still carries traffic today

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Mackinac Bridge, a long white suspension bridge with two tall towers, spanning the blue Straits of Mackinac in Michigan under a bright sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Fifteen years after the wind tore a suspension bridge to shreds, engineers built an even bigger one across one of America's stormiest straits, and made its five-mile deck bend on purpose

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The Teton Dam breaching in 1976, a torrent of brown water bursting through a huge gap in the earthen dam into the canyon below

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1976 America's newest federal dam collapsed the very first time it was filled, sending a wall of water through Idaho farm towns and helping to end the age of the great dams

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

An early 1900s view of Milton Hershey's large brick chocolate factory with tall smokestacks and a tidy planned town around it in rural Pennsylvania

Industry & Mega-Builds

The chocolate king Milton Hershey had no children, so he quietly signed his entire fortune over to a school for orphans and told almost no one for years

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A row of identical austere 11-storey modernist concrete Pruitt-Igoe apartment towers under a grey sky in 1950s St Louis

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1956 St Louis opened a gleaming 33-tower housing project hailed as the future of the American city, and 16 years later it was blowing the same buildings to rubble on live television

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

A huge faded yellow concrete arrow on the desert ground beside a tall steel beacon tower under a wide sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1920s America built a chain of giant concrete arrows and lit towers stretching coast to coast, a lighted highway in the sky that guided airmail pilots flying blind through the night

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Workers in the 1860s turning rows of jackscrews beneath a large brick building during the raising of Chicago

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1850s Chicago was sinking into its own mud, so the city jacked its buildings and streets several feet into the air, lifting entire brick blocks while shops and hotels stayed open inside them

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The tall slender Beaux-Arts Singer Building with its domed crown rising above the rooftops of 1908 New York

Industry & Mega-Builds

For one year it was the tallest building in the world, a graceful tower crowning the New York skyline, and then in 1968 the Singer Building was quietly torn down and almost completely forgotten

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The cracked white salt flat of the dried Owens Lake bed stretching toward mountains under a dusty sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Los Angeles built a 233-mile aqueduct in 1913 and quietly drained an entire valley, turning a huge lake into the worst dust hazard in America, and it is still paying billions to hold the dust down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1930s US Navy airship in flight releasing a small biplane fighter from a trapeze beneath its belly, one of the flying aircraft carriers

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the 1930s the US Navy really did fly two enormous airships that carried fighter planes inside their bellies and launched and caught them in mid-air on a trapeze

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A postal worker loading a cylindrical carrier into a brass pneumatic tube mail station in an early 1900s post office

Industry & Mega-Builds

For more than half a century American cities fired the mail through underground tubes at 30 miles an hour on blasts of compressed air, and once even shot a live cat across town

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An empty concrete Cincinnati subway tunnel with an abandoned station platform lit by a single work light

Industry & Mega-Builds

Cincinnati spent years digging a full subway under its streets in the 1920s, then ran out of money before a single train ever ran, and the finished tunnels still sit empty a century later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 raging through a downtown of burning brick buildings under a smoke-black sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1904 fire crews rushed to Baltimore from as far as New York, only to find their hose couplings would not fit the city's hydrants, so they could only stand and watch it burn

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Inside SubTropolis, a vast underground complex of paved roads between huge square limestone pillars

Industry & Mega-Builds

An old Kansas City mine was hollowed into the world's largest underground business complex, where trucks drive miles of roads through solid rock and the temperature never changes all year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The vast domed interior of the Houston Astrodome with tiers of empty seats under a huge curved roof

Industry & Mega-Builds

Houston built the world's first domed stadium and called it the eighth wonder, then discovered the roof killed the grass, so it invented fake grass and accidentally named it after the building

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1960s Greenwich Village street protest of the kind Jane Jacobs led against a planned highway

Industry & Mega-Builds

A writer with no power stopped the most feared builder in America from bulldozing a ten-lane highway through Lower Manhattan, and in doing so saved the neighborhoods we now call SoHo and Greenwich Village

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The tidy brick rowhouses of the model company town of Pullman, Illinois in the 1890s

Industry & Mega-Builds

A railroad tycoon built a model town where he owned his workers' homes, shops and church, until he cut their pay but not their rent and touched off a strike that shut down the nation's railroads

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The blue mirror-glass facade of the John Hancock Tower reflecting the Boston sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

Boston's tallest skyscraper was an award-winning masterpiece that started raining 500-pound windowpanes onto the street, and for years it was wrapped in so much plywood that people called it the Plywood Palace

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The calm surface of the Quabbin Reservoir over the drowned Swift River Valley in autumn

Industry & Mega-Builds

Massachusetts erased four whole towns from the map and drowned their homes, farms and even their graveyards under the Quabbin Reservoir so that faraway Boston would never run out of water

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An aerial view of the grassy mounds of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, now Freshkills Park

Industry & Mega-Builds

Fresh Kills on Staten Island was the largest garbage dump on Earth, a mound of trash visible from space, and New York is turning it into a park nearly three times the size of Central Park

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Kinzua Bridge, a towering iron railroad viaduct spanning a forested Pennsylvania gorge

Industry & Mega-Builds

For over a century the Kinzua Bridge in Pennsylvania was one of the tallest railroad bridges on Earth, until a tornado tore half of it down in seconds in 2003, minutes after the repair crew went home

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The Edmund Fitzgerald, a huge Great Lakes ore freighter, battered by towering waves in a Lake Superior storm

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest ship on the Great Lakes, then on a stormy night in 1975 it vanished into Lake Superior with all 29 crew and no distress call, and no one is sure why

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The towering red 14-story concentration mill of Kennecott, Alaska standing against a glacier and snowy peaks

Industry & Mega-Builds

Prospectors found the richest copper ever discovered on an Alaskan peak, and Kennecott built a town and a 196-mile railroad across glaciers to reach it, then abandoned it in a single day when the ore ran out

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A giant Apollo-era Saturn V rocket lifting off on a massive column of fire and smoke

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Saturn V remains the most powerful machine that ever carried humans, five giant engines burning 15 tons of fuel a second to fling astronauts at the Moon

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The tiled interior of the Holland Tunnel with early automobiles and rows of ceiling lights

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Holland Tunnel solved a deadly new problem, how to stop a mile of car exhaust from poisoning drivers underwater, and it is named for the chief engineer the strain killed before it opened

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A grey welded steel Liberty ship under construction in a 1940s wartime shipyard with cranes

Industry & Mega-Builds

In the Second World War, American shipyards run largely by women welders learned to build a giant Liberty ship in weeks, and once, as a stunt, in under five days

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A devastated coastal town of splintered wooden houses after the 1900 Galveston hurricane

Industry & Mega-Builds

The 1900 Galveston hurricane killed thousands and nearly erased a Texas city from the map, so its survivors did something astonishing, they lifted the entire city into the air and walled out the sea

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century Bessemer converter erupting in a fountain of orange and white sparks inside a dark steel mill

Industry & Mega-Builds

Almost no one has heard of the Bessemer process, but this sparky trick for making cheap steel in 1856 quietly built the railways, bridges and skyscrapers of the modern world

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 19th-century canal with wooden barge boats pulled by mules on a towpath beside a small town, evoking the Erie Canal

Industry & Mega-Builds

Critics mocked the Erie Canal as Clinton's Folly, a mad ditch dug across 363 miles of wilderness, and then it opened the American interior and made New York the nation's greatest city

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A long tunnel carved into thick blue-white glacial ice with a prefabricated hut inside, part of Camp Century under Greenland

Industry & Mega-Builds

The US Army built a nuclear-powered city called Camp Century inside the Greenland ice sheet to hide missiles from the Soviets, but the ice itself slowly crushed the whole thing

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A classic wooden San Francisco cable car climbing a very steep city street with the bay visible below

Industry & Mega-Builds

The San Francisco cable car was not built for charm or tourists, it was born because one man could not forget the sight of horses dying on a steep wet hill

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The old steel eyebar-chain Silver Bridge spanning a wide grey river between two towns under an overcast 1960s sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

A single crack no wider than a few millimeters, hidden deep inside one steel bar, dropped the Silver Bridge and dozens of Christmas shoppers into the Ohio River in under a minute

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Chicago River flowing through downtown Chicago between skyscrapers and bridges under an overcast sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1900 Chicago was poisoning itself with its own sewage, so its engineers did the unthinkable and reversed the entire Chicago River to make it flow backward, away from the lake

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Ever Given, an enormous container ship, wedged diagonally across a narrow desert canal, its bow buried in the bank, blocking all traffic

Industry & Mega-Builds

A gust of wind turned one of the largest ships ever built sideways in the Suez Canal, and for six days the Ever Given jammed a tenth of world trade behind it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a long low highway crossing open sea with a man-made island where the road dips into a tunnel and a ship passing over

Industry & Mega-Builds

For 17.6 miles across the open mouth of Chesapeake Bay, a highway carries cars over the water and then plunges twice into tunnels beneath it so that Navy ships can sail overhead

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A huge crater torn in the concrete spillway of Oroville Dam with brown floodwater blasting sideways through the broken chute

Industry & Mega-Builds

A crater tore open the spillway of the tallest dam in America during a flood, and within days 188,000 people downstream of Oroville Dam were told to run for higher ground

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

The Key Bridge collapse at night, a steel truss span fallen into a dark river with a huge container ship in the wreckage and emergency lights

Industry & Mega-Builds

A blacked-out cargo ship drifted toward Baltimore's Key Bridge in the dark, and the mayday it sent bought just enough time to stop traffic and save dozens, but six workers still fell

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Morandi Bridge in Genoa, its concrete A-shaped towers carrying the motorway over the city under a dark storm sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

A motorway bridge in Genoa stood for 51 years, then fell in seconds and killed 43 people in a rainstorm

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The Millennium Tower, a 58-story San Francisco glass high-rise, rising over the skyline as it keeps sinking and leaning

Industry & Mega-Builds

They paid millions for condos in the sky, then watched their luxury tower sink 18 inches and lean toward the street

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A 1948 Tucker 48 sedan with its distinctive central third headlight in a showroom

Industry & Mega-Builds

He built the safest car in America, then a courtroom destroyed his company

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Rescue crews searching the collapsed concrete rubble of the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, 1995

Industry & Mega-Builds

They were warned the building was falling, and kept the doors open

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Iron Bridge, a single-span cast-iron arch over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale, completed in 1779

Industry & Mega-Builds

The bridge that launched the Industrial Revolution, and ruined its maker

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Bertha Benz driving the three-wheeled Benz Motorwagen along a country road in 1888 with her two sons

Industry & Mega-Builds

The wife who stole the first car and drove it into history

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The original 1893 Ferris Wheel towering over the Chicago World's Fair midway

Industry & Mega-Builds

The wheel built to out-Eiffel the Eiffel Tower, and the man it ruined

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An ornate gas-lit Victorian underground station with a fountain, chandeliers and a grand piano, the Beach Pneumatic Transit beneath Broadway

Industry & Mega-Builds

The secret subway one man dug under Broadway in the dark

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The Burj Khalifa towering over the Dubai skyline at dusk, the world's tallest building

Industry & Mega-Builds

The tallest building ever made was renamed at the last second after a crisis nearly sank Dubai

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The vast golden dome of Hagia Sophia ringed with arched windows, seen from inside

Industry & Mega-Builds

Two mathematicians built a dome so daring it seemed to hang from heaven, and it has stood 1,500 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A wide modern multi-lane underground highway tunnel with cars, like the Big Dig in Boston

Industry & Mega-Builds

To bury a city's highway, engineers froze the ground and ran up the biggest road bill in history

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The white marble Leaning Tower of Pisa tilting against a clear blue sky

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was about to fall, so engineers un-leaned it just enough

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The giant golden tuned mass damper sphere hanging on steel cables inside the upper floors of Taipei 101

Industry & Mega-Builds

A 660-ton golden ball hangs inside this skyscraper to stop it swaying in a typhoon

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The twin-bore Hallandsås Tunnel portal cut into a green forested ridge in southern Sweden

Industry & Mega-Builds

A tunnel leaked so badly that Sweden poured in poison, and then the poison got out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The 1869 golden spike ceremony completing the Transcontinental Railroad, with two locomotives meeting at Promontory

Industry & Mega-Builds

Thousands blasted a railroad through the mountains, then were written out of the story they built

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The ornate first Eddystone Lighthouse, a tall wooden tower on a wave-battered rock off Plymouth

Industry & Mega-Builds

He wished to be inside his lighthouse in the greatest storm ever, and the sea granted it

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The collapsed iron span of the first Tay Bridge after the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster, with a gap over the stormy firth

Industry & Mega-Builds

Scotland's longest bridge collapsed in a gale and took a whole train into the river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The grand atrium of the Hyatt Regency, where the walkway collapse happened, with suspended skywalks crossing high above the lobby floor

Industry & Mega-Builds

A single change no one double-checked dropped two walkways onto a crowded dance floor

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A large container ship moving through the Suez Canal flanked by open desert

Industry & Mega-Builds

A sea-level ditch dug by hand across a desert still holds the world's trade hostage

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The huge silver British R101 airship moored to its mast above Cardington in 1930

Industry & Mega-Builds

Britain's giant airship crashed on its first real voyage, killing more people than the Hindenburg

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The great steel cantilever Quebec Bridge spanning the wide St. Lawrence River

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest cantilever bridge collapsed twice and killed 88 men, 33 from one small town

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Workers on the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1936 with a safety net in the fog below

Industry & Mega-Builds

A net under the Golden Gate Bridge caught 19 falling men, who formed a club nobody wanted to join

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

The lone surviving concrete monolith of the St. Francis Dam in a wrecked canyon after the 1928 collapse

Industry & Mega-Builds

He inspected his dam and called it safe, twelve hours before it killed more than 400 people

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

An aerial view of a huge hydroelectric dam and reservoir of the James Bay Project in the boreal forest of northern Quebec

Industry & Mega-Builds

Quebec reversed wild subarctic rivers to build one of the planet's biggest power systems, and flooded 11,000 square kilometres of Cree homeland to do it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carrying a narrowboat in a cast-iron trough high on tall stone piers across a green Welsh valley

Industry & Mega-Builds

In 1805 engineers sent canal boats floating across the sky in an iron trough 38 metres up, with nothing but air on the open side

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A modern commuter train emerging from the deep Marmaray tunnel under the Bosphorus between Europe and Asia

Industry & Mega-Builds

Turkey spent a century dreaming of a tunnel under the Bosphorus, then digging it unearthed a lost harbour and 8,000 years of buried history

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A large concrete hydro-electric dam of the Snowy Mountains Scheme set in rugged Australian alpine mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

It took 100,000 workers from 30 countries and 121 lives to turn Australia's rivers backward through the mountains

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Guoliang Tunnel, a rough rock road cut by hand into a vertical cliff with open windows letting daylight onto the floor

Industry & Mega-Builds

Cut off from the world by a sheer cliff, 13 villagers spent five years carving a road through solid mountain with hammers and chisels

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Looking down the deep brick-lined shaft of the Woodingdean Well into darkness

Industry & Mega-Builds

To dodge a water bill, Victorian paupers spent four years hand-digging a well deeper than the Empire State Building is tall

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Great Wall of China snaking along a misty mountain ridge

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Great Wall is not one wall, you can't see it from space, and it repeatedly failed to keep invaders out

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Aerial view of the vast terraced pit of the Mirny diamond mine in snowy Siberia

Industry & Mega-Builds

Soviet miners dug a 525-metre hole into frozen Siberia for its diamonds, so vast that aircraft are banned from flying over it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Karakoram Highway clinging to a cliff high in the snow-capped mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

The highest paved road on Earth cost about a thousand lives to carve through the mountains, and the peaks keep trying to swallow it back

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Aerial view of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge curving across the open sea

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest sea crossing runs 55 km, then dives into a tunnel on the seabed so ships can sail right over the traffic

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Black migrant workers drilling inside the dusty Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster site in 1930s West Virginia

Industry & Mega-Builds

They were sent to drill a mountain of pure silica with no masks while the bosses wore them, and hundreds died of dust in their lungs within five years

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The narrow Corinth Canal cut deep between high vertical rock walls in Greece, a small ship passing through

Industry & Mega-Builds

People dreamed of slicing through this Greek isthmus for 2,000 years, an emperor tried it with thousands of slaves, and when it was finally cut it was almost too narrow to use

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The interior of the Laerdal Tunnel opening into a large cavern bathed in blue and gold light deep inside a Norwegian mountain

Industry & Mega-Builds

The world's longest road tunnel is so long it could hypnotise drivers to sleep, so engineers carved glowing blue caves into the mountain to keep them awake

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A train on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway crossing a vast high plateau with snow-capped mountains

Industry & Mega-Builds

To build the highest railway on Earth across ground that melts and heaves, engineers had to do something strange: keep the frozen earth frozen on purpose

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The long straight Afsluitdijk dam stretching to the horizon with the sea on one side and a calm lake on the other

Industry & Mega-Builds

The Dutch did not just hold back the sea, they erased an entire sea from the map, damming off the Zuiderzee with a 32 km wall and turning salt water into farmland

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The deep-red steel cantilever Forth Bridge spanning the Firth of Forth in Scotland with a train crossing

Industry

After a bridge collapse killed 75 people, terrified Scotland demanded a bridge that could never fall, and the Forth Bridge was deliberately over-built into an icon

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The long interior of the Seikan Tunnel curving into the distance deep underground with a single rail track

Industry

Japan dug the world's longest undersea tunnel, the Seikan Tunnel, because a typhoon sank five ferries in the strait and killed more than 1,400 people in a single night

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A man in uniform on horseback raising a sword at the ribbon during the Sydney Harbour Bridge opening in 1932

Industry

As the premier prepared to open the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, a man in uniform rode out of the crowd on a horse and slashed the ribbon with a cavalry sword first

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The gleaming stainless-steel Art Deco crown and spire of the Chrysler Building shining against a blue sky

Industry

To win the race for the world's tallest building, the architect of the Chrysler Building hid a 185-foot spire inside its crown and raised it in 90 minutes to ambush his rival

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The Kowloon Walled City as one dense monolithic block of stacked buildings covered in wires, pipes and laundry under a hazy sky

Industry

Tens of thousands of people once lived stacked inside one ungoverned block in Hong Kong, the Kowloon Walled City, the densest place humanity ever built, and it worked far better than its lawless legend suggests

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An aerial view of Palm Jumeirah, the palm-tree-shaped artificial island off Dubai, with its trunk, fronds and crescent breakwater in turquoise sea

Industry

Dubai built Palm Jumeirah, an island shaped like a palm tree, out of nothing but sand sprayed from the sea by GPS and held together by a curving wall of rock

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

An aerial view of the vast terraced spiral of the Bingham Canyon open-pit copper mine, a kilometre deep, under a clear sky

Industry

Bingham Canyon is the largest hole humans have ever dug, a mine a kilometre deep and visible from space, into which the biggest landslide in mining history once fell

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The enormous Prelude FLNG floating gas facility, a vast red and grey industrial vessel covered in pipework, moored on the open sea

Industry

Prelude FLNG is a floating gas factory longer than the tallest skyscraper, built to ride out a category-five cyclone while turning natural gas to liquid on the open ocean

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The blue tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider curving away into the distance, lined with its huge cylindrical magnets

Industry

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest machine humanity has built, a 27-kilometre ring colder than space that smashes protons together to study the smallest things there are

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

NASA's massive tracked crawler-transporter carrying a mobile launch platform and rocket along a wide gravel road toward the launch pad

Industry

The most powerful rockets begin their journey to space at one mile per hour, riding a 2,700-tonne NASA crawler-transporter built to keep them perfectly upright

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Millau Viaduct, a long white cable-stayed bridge on tall slender piers, spanning a green river valley in southern France

Industry

The mast of the Millau Viaduct in southern France stands taller than the Eiffel Tower, carrying drivers across a valley so high they often cross above the clouds

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The stainless steel Gateway Arch in St. Louis rising 630 feet above the city against a blue sky

Industry

When the final piece of the Gateway Arch would not fit, St. Louis firefighters hosed one leg with cold water to shrink it while jacks forced the gap open

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Yellow MOSE flood barrier gates raised out of the water at a Venice lagoon inlet, holding back the sea

Industry

Venice spent six billion euros and a decade fighting corruption to build MOSE, a wall of 78 hidden gates that rise from the seabed to hold back the floods drowning the city

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Antonov An-225 Mriya, a vast six-engined cargo aircraft, taking off against a wide sky

Industry

The Antonov An-225 was the largest plane ever built, a six-engined giant made to carry a space shuttle, and it was destroyed in its hangar in the opening days of Russia's invasion

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The London Millennium Bridge, a slender steel footbridge over the Thames with St Paul's Cathedral behind

Industry

London opened a sleek new footbridge over the Thames in 2000, then watched 90,000 people make it sway so badly the Millennium Bridge had to close just two days later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Leaning Tower of Pisa tilting against a blue sky, the white marble bell tower in its grassy square

Industry

An engineer saved the Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapse by doing the one thing that sounds insane, digging soil out from under its higher side until it leaned back

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship lying on its side beside the island of Giglio before the salvage

Industry

For 30 months a South African salvage master and 500 workers fought to roll the wrecked Costa Concordia upright, the largest ship ever lifted off the seabed in one piece

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The twin brick arches of the Thames Tunnel lit by gas lamps with Victorian visitors walking through, Brunel's tunnel under the river

Industry

The first tunnel ever dug under a river was made possible by a creature engineers had spent centuries trying to destroy: the shipworm that eats ships from the inside

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Aerial view of the Oresund Bridge crossing the sea toward an artificial island where it descends into a tunnel

Industry

A bridge between two countries dives into the sea and becomes a tunnel halfway across, and the island of rubble it leaves behind has turned into an accidental nature reserve

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A 1960s woman chemist holding up a beaker of cloudy liquid, like Stephanie Kwolek discovering Kevlar

Industry

A cloudy liquid that should have been thrown away became a fibre five times stronger than steel, and the woman who made it never got rich from the patent

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A World War Two Mulberry harbour off the Normandy coast with floating roadways, concrete breakwaters and ships unloading

Industry

Unable to capture a port, the Allies built two entire harbours in secret and towed them across the Channel to keep the D-Day invasion alive

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The 1851 Crystal Palace, a vast glass and iron exhibition hall with an arched transept gleaming in a London park

Industry

The most dazzling building of the 19th century was designed not by an architect but by a gardener, who copied its skeleton from a giant Amazon waterlily

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The giant Victorian steamship SS Great Eastern paying out a transatlantic cable on the open ocean

Industry

The largest ship ever built was a famous flop, until it found its purpose laying the cable that shrank the Atlantic from ten days to a few minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Aerial view of the Afsluitdijk, the long straight dam that sealed off the Zuiderzee, with open sea on one side and a calm lake on the other

Industry

The Dutch got tired of the sea flooding them, so they walled off an entire arm of the ocean and grew a province on the bottom

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Hoover Dam, a huge curved concrete dam wedged in a desert canyon holding back a blue reservoir

Industry

The concrete in the Hoover Dam would have taken 125 years to cool on its own, so engineers ran 900 kilometres of ice-water pipes through it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, a vast white suspension bridge with two towers spanning a strait in Japan at dusk

Industry

A magnitude 7 earthquake struck this Japanese bridge mid-construction, shoved its towers apart, and left it a metre longer than planned

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The towering Troll A platform standing in the North Sea with a tiny supply boat beside it for scale

Industry

The tallest thing humans have ever moved is a concrete tower taller than the Eiffel Tower, floated upright across the North Sea in 1995

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A high-speed train entering the Gotthard Base Tunnel portal at the foot of the towering Swiss Alps

Industry

Rather than climb over the Alps, engineers drove the world's longest tunnel straight through their base, under 2.3 kilometres of solid rock

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The vast Panama Canal construction site at the Culebra Cut, with steam shovels and railways carving through the hills

Industry

The man who built the Suez Canal was defeated in Panama by a mosquito, and 22,000 deaths later a doubted army doctor finished what he could not

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

The four giant seated colossi of Ramesses II carved into the cliff at Abu Simbel in golden desert light

Industry

To stop a dam from drowning Ramesses II's 3,000-year-old temple, engineers sawed it into 1,042 blocks and rebuilt it higher up the cliff

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Two Channel Tunnel miners shaking hands through a broken hole in a chalk tunnel wall deep under the sea

Industry

The Englishman who broke through the last wall of chalk to shake a French worker's hand had just ended Britain's 8,000 years as an island

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

The Citicorp Center skyscraper with its sloped roof rising over the Manhattan skyline

Industry

A young engineer's question sent William LeMessurier back to his calculations, where he found that his gleaming new Citicorp Center skyscraper could be toppled by a strong New York wind

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

The Vasa warship preserved and raised in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, the massive dark oak hull towering above visitors in the exhibition hall

Industry

The Vasa warship had 64 cannons and sank twenty minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, and when divers found it 333 years later at the bottom of Stockholm harbor it was almost perfectly intact

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

The Spruce Goose H-4 Hercules flying boat built by Howard Hughes floating on Long Beach harbor in 1947

Industry

Congress accused Howard Hughes of defrauding the government on a wooden flying boat that never fought in the war it was built for, so on November 2, 1947 he climbed in the Spruce Goose, flew it once for twenty-six seconds at seventy feet, and put it back in its hangar forever

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisting violently in the wind moments before it collapsed into Puget Sound in November 1940

Industry

A journalist abandoned his daughter's dog in his car to escape Galloping Gertie, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge took the dog with it when it collapsed four months after opening

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall glass-sided elevator structure climbing the face of a sheer sandstone cliff among the misty stone pillars of Zhangjiajie in China

Industry

China built a glass elevator 300 metres up a cliff in its most beautiful park, and it split opinion

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wide canal full of water carried on a long bridge over the River Elbe, with a barge crossing high above the river and green banks on either side

Industry

Germany built a giant bridge so boats could sail straight over a river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The vast inverted-pyramid of crisscrossing sandstone steps of Chand Baori descending steeply to a small pool of green water at the bottom

Industry

This Indian stepwell drops thirteen storeys into the Earth on 3,500 perfect steps

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Love Canal Niagara Falls New York abandoned toxic neighborhood, empty 1970s American suburban houses with warning signs, chemical waste remediation site

Industry

In 1978 Lois Gibbs discovered her children's school sat on a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, organized 900 families, and created the Superfund

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Seveso disaster 1976 ICMESA chemical factory northern Italy, industrial chemical plant with tall chimneys and vapor plume over Italian residential town, Lombardy countryside

Industry

In July 1976 the Seveso disaster released dioxin over a northern Italian town, covered children in lesions, and sent forty-one drums of contaminated soil on a nine-month disappearance across Europe

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The white sail-like shells of the Sydney Opera House gleaming on the harbour against a bright blue sky

Industry

The architect of the Sydney Opera House quit in fury, left the country, and never once saw his masterpiece finished

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

SS Eastland disaster 1915 Chicago River, steamship capsized on its side at the dock with rescuers alongside the overturned hull

Industry

On July 24, 1915, the steamship Eastland capsized in the Chicago River while still tied to the dock, killing 835 people going to a company picnic, and the Titanic disaster was partly why it happened

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Close-up of a ship's steel hull at the waterline showing the round Plimsoll load line marking painted in white

Industry

Ship owners overloaded vessels and let sailors drown for the insurance money, until Samuel Plimsoll forced a safety line onto every hull

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A large munitions ship on fire in Halifax Harbour sending thick black smoke into the winter sky of 1917, Canadian port buildings visible on the waterfront, dramatic documentary historical scene

Industry

On December 6, 1917, Vincent Coleman stayed at his telegraph key in Halifax to warn a passenger train that the burning ship nearby carried ammunition and was about to destroy half a city

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A large cargo ship sending enormous black smoke columns into the sky over an American harbor, massive industrial fire on the dockside in 1947, dramatic morning light over Texas City port

Industry

On April 16, 1947, all 28 members of the Texas City volunteer fire department walked toward a burning cargo ship not knowing it carried 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal India at dawn, industrial plant with smokestacks, empty streets below, moody dramatic light

Industry

In December 1984 the Bhopal gas disaster killed fifteen thousand people overnight in India, Union Carbide's CEO was arrested, posted bail, flew home, and was never brought back

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire burning in the Asch Building on Washington Place in New York City on March 25 1911, smoke and flames pouring from upper floors, crowds gathering on the street below

Industry

On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in eighteen minutes in a Manhattan factory fire, the owners were acquitted, and the 26-year-old social worker who watched them jump from the windows became Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Aerial view of Johnstown Pennsylvania devastation after the 1889 flood, Conemaugh valley filled with debris and collapsed 19th century wooden buildings, wreckage of the dam failure

Industry

On May 31, 1889, a dam owned by a private fishing club whose members included Andrew Carnegie burst above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and killed 2,209 people in minutes

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Hindenburg airship on fire over Lakehurst New Jersey in 1937, massive zeppelin burning with orange and red flames, thick black smoke rising into the night sky

Industry

The Hindenburg was built to fly on American helium, but Harold Ickes blocked the sale to Germany, so on May 6, 1937, it burned on hydrogen over New Jersey

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The wrought-iron Eiffel Tower rising over Paris at golden hour, its lattice silhouette against a warm sky

Industry

Paris hated the Eiffel Tower and meant to tear it down after 20 years, until it became too useful as a radio antenna

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall stone lighthouse rising straight out of the open grey sea with white waves crashing around its base and no land in sight

Industry

A Scottish reef vanishes under the sea twice a day, yet two hundred years ago engineers built the Bell Rock lighthouse on it and it still shines

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A Welsh valley mining village with a black coal waste slag tip looming on a steep hillside above rows of stone cottages, overcast grey sky, Aberfan 1966 disaster

Industry

Aberfan residents had warned for years that the coal tip above their village would kill someone, and on October 21 1966 it slid onto a primary school and killed 116 children

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Banqiao Dam on the Ru River in Henan Province China, a concrete dam wall above a wide river valley, grey sky, historical engineering photograph

Industry

China built a dam and called it indestructible, silenced the engineer who warned it would fail, and in August 1975 it drowned more than 170,000 people in a single night

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The ornately carved wooden warship Vasa under sail leaving Stockholm harbour with bright painted sculptures along its high stern

Industry

The warship Vasa capsized minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, and the cold Baltic kept it almost whole for 333 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A documentary photographer on the dock of Minamata's fishing harbor in the 1970s, photographing traditional wooden boats on the misty bay with the Chisso Corporation factory smokestacks visible across the water

Industry

A Japanese fishing city watched its people lose the ability to walk, talk, and hold their children, and the company causing it with mercury had known for years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Concorde, a sleek white delta-wing supersonic airliner with a pointed nose, climbing into a blue sky

Industry

For 27 years the Concorde flew passengers across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound, and then the world quietly retired it and went back to flying slower than our grandparents did

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Caspian Sea Monster, a colossal Soviet ekranoplan with stubby wings and jet engines, skimming low over the sea

Industry

American spy satellites spotted a 500-tonne machine skimming the Caspian Sea metres above the water, and the Soviet craft nicknamed the Caspian Sea Monster was neither ship nor plane

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

An ironworker balanced on a steel beam high above the New York City skyline

Industry

The skyscrapers and bridges of New York were raised by Mohawk ironworkers from a reserve near Montreal, men who walked steel beams hundreds of metres up as if on a sidewalk

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The tall thin concrete arch of the Vajont Dam wedged in a narrow alpine gorge at dusk

Industry

Engineers built one of the world's tallest dams in the Italian Alps and ignored the crumbling mountain above it, and in 1963 the Vajont Dam unleashed a wave that killed almost 2,000 people

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Brooklyn Bridge around 1883, its gothic stone towers spanning the East River

Industry

When the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge was left paralysed by caisson disease, his wife Emily Roebling quietly learned engineering and spent eleven years getting the great bridge finished

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An American-style town with white clapboard houses and a water tower on the bank of the Amazon, jungle crowding behind it

Industry

Henry Ford tried to build a slice of small-town America deep in the Amazon to grow his own rubber, and the jungle, the blight and his own workers defeated Fordlandia

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Pantheon dome in Rome, a 2,000-year-old Roman concrete structure

Industry

Roman concrete has stood for 2,000 years while modern concrete crumbles in decades, and in 2023 MIT scientists finally worked out the strange self-healing secret hiding inside it

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The Eastgate Centre, a brick office building with tall ventilation chimneys on its roof, in Harare

Industry

An architect in Zimbabwe skipped the air conditioning and copied a termite mound instead, and his Eastgate Centre cools a whole office block on a fraction of the energy

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The Bagger 288, the largest land vehicle ever built, a colossal bucket-wheel excavator towering in a German open-pit lignite mine

Industry

The Bagger 288 is the heaviest machine ever to move on land, a 13,500-ton excavator that chews through whole German villages to reach the dirtiest coal there is, as it did at Lützerath

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Stari Most, the arched stone Ottoman bridge over the Neretva in Mostar

Industry

A 16th-century Ottoman bridge was the soul of Mostar until a 1993 war shelled it into the river, and then the city raised Stari Most again, stone by stone, and the divers came back

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The brick arches of a grand Victorian London sewer tunnel built by Joseph Bazalgette

Industry

In 1858 the Thames became an open sewer so foul that Parliament nearly fled, so Joseph Bazalgette built London a sewer system twice as big as it needed, and it lasted 160 years

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The abandoned Hashima Island, or Gunkanjima, a concrete ghost city rising from the gray sea off Nagasaki, Japan, ringed by a seawall

Industry

A tiny rock off Japan called Hashima Island was once the most densely crowded place on Earth, over 5,000 people mining coal under the sea, until oil emptied it almost overnight

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A robotic gantry printer extruding the curved walls of a 3D-printed home on a building site

Industry

A machine the size of a house now squeezes out walls overnight, and from a Texas suburb to a Malawi schoolyard, 3D-printed homes are going up in a day instead of a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona seen from below, its tall central tower crowned with a large cross rising above a cluster of stone spires

Industry

Antoni Gaudi spent 43 years on a church he knew he would never see finished, and now, 100 years after a tram killed him, Barcelona has finally crowned the Sagrada Familia as the tallest church on Earth

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of a vast rectangular artificial island airport in a calm blue sea with long runways and a slender bridge to the distant mainland at golden hour

Industry

Japan ran out of land for an airport, so it built an entire island in the sea, and that island has been sinking under the runways ever since

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The Falkirk Wheel, a huge modern rotating boat lift with two curved steel arms and water-filled gondolas, beside a canal basin in Scotland under a bright sky

Industry

Scotland reconnected two canals that had been cut apart for decades not with a staircase of locks but with a single giant wheel that scoops boats up and turns them through the air

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A line of air bubbles rising in a diagonal across an Amsterdam canal at golden hour, a person watching from the brick quayside

Industry

Three friends in Amsterdam got tired of watching plastic drift out to sea, so they strung a curtain of air bubbles across a canal that has now caught a million pieces

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A fresh black tar road in India with a worker beside a heap of shredded colourful waste plastic

Industry

India drowns in plastic bags it cannot recycle, so a chemistry professor worked out how to shred them into the tar and pave the country's roads with its own rubbish

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A row of blue and red modular pods on hydraulic legs and skis standing on the flat white Antarctic ice shelf

Industry

Britain built its Antarctic science base on giant skis so the ice could not swallow it, and when a crack opened beneath the station, the whole thing got up and walked 23 kilometres away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A restored sunken stream park in central Seoul with clear water and greenery below skyscrapers

Industry

Seoul spent decades burying a river under concrete and a six lane elevated highway, then tore the whole road down to bring the water back into the light

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A large dark-red wooden church being moved whole on giant trailers along a road through an Arctic Swedish town

Industry

The Swedish town of Kiruna is being moved three kilometres down the road, homes, church and all, because the giant iron mine that built it is swallowing the ground beneath it

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A bright orange volcanic fissure erupting fountains of lava across a dark Icelandic landscape at night with a town and power plant glowing in the distance

Industry

An Icelandic town that lived off the planet's free heat had to flee when the ground tore open, and now engineers fight the lava with 14 kilometres of earth walls

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

The restored Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral with its rebuilt spire glowing under a dramatic evening sky across the Seine

Industry

Five years after the world watched Notre-Dame burn, an army of 2,000 carpenters and stonemasons has raised it from the ashes by hand, rebuilding its lost oak forest with medieval axes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An off-grid Earthship home set into an earth berm in the New Mexico high desert with a sloping wall of south-facing glass

Industry

An architect in New Mexico lost his license fighting to build houses out of old tires, cans and bottles, and 50 years on his off-grid Earthships have spread around the world

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A long U-shaped floating barrier towed between two ships across the open ocean, gathering floating plastic into a retention zone

Industry

Experts said cleaning plastic out of the ocean was impossible, so a Dutch teenager quit engineering school to prove them wrong, and Boyan Slat's machines have now pulled 50 million kilograms from the sea

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An enormous tall suspension bridge spanning a vast deep misty river canyon in mountainous Guizhou China, with clouds drifting below the bridge deck

Industry

China just opened the highest bridge on Earth, a span 625 metres above a river gorge so deep that clouds drift below it, turning a winding two-hour mountain crossing into a two-minute drive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An enormous twin-hull construction ship closing around an offshore oil platform at sea

Industry

The heaviest vehicle ever built is a 382 metre ship that swallows an entire oil platform between two giant hulls and lifts its 48,000 ton deck out of the sea in a single move, then carries it away

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A vast modern steel factory with tall towers and hydrogen electrolyser buildings in a snowy Swedish landscape at dusk

Industry

A Swedish factory is about to make steel without coal, replacing it with green hydrogen that emits only water and strips up to 95 percent of the carbon from one of the world's dirtiest industries

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of the two huge white steel arms of the Maeslant storm surge barrier on the banks of a canal near Rotterdam

Industry

To guard Rotterdam from the sea, the Dutch built two of the largest moving structures on Earth, a pair of steel arms each the size of the Eiffel Tower that a computer swings shut across the water by itself

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A huge container ship squeezed into a narrow Panama Canal lock surrounded by tropical forest

Industry

The Panama Canal does not run on seawater but on rain, and every giant ship that crosses dumps about 200 million litres of fresh water into the ocean, which is why a drought can choke world trade

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A vast rectangular concrete tunnel element floating in the sea between two vessels before being lowered to the seabed

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A coastal seawater desalination plant on the Red Sea at sunset with solar panels

Industry

Saudi Arabia has almost no rivers, so it drinks the sea, and its newest mega-plant just stopped burning oil to do it, turning 600 million litres of seawater into drinking water a day

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A suspension bridge spanning a deep green canyon in Guizhou

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A colossal hydropower dam under construction in a Himalayan gorge

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A grid of direct air capture fan units on a volcanic Icelandic plateau

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A nuclear power plant beside a glowing data center at dusk

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026

A lit expressway tunnel portal in a snowy Tianshan mountainside

Industry

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

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026