These places have been wiped off the map. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for locations on Earth that have been abandoned, significantly altered, or destroyed thanks to human activity, climate change, or natural occurrences.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 In the heart of Western Australia's north lies a special but lethal place, the ghost
00:05 town of Wittenoom.
00:07 Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for locations on Earth that
00:12 have been abandoned, significantly altered or destroyed thanks to human activity or natural
00:17 occurrences.
00:18 It all began back in May 1962, when local officials unwittingly sparked an underground
00:24 fire.
00:27 Number 10.
00:28 Pitcher, Oklahoma.
00:29 For half a century, the town of Pitcher, Oklahoma, was one of the United States' leading producers
00:34 of lead and zinc.
00:35 Pitcher was at the epicenter of the metal mining boom, becoming the largest exporter
00:39 of lead and zinc in the world.
00:41 As a result of minimal oversight, the mining operations literally undermined the foundations
00:46 of the town.
00:47 Toxic piles of waste were left all over the area, some of which found its way into children's
00:51 sandboxes.
00:52 In 1983, the EPA included Pitcher as part of its massive Tar Creek Superfund site.
00:58 When mining stopped in the '70s, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Pitcher a Superfund
01:03 site, a name given to areas so polluted they're placed on the national priority list for cleanup.
01:08 Federal and state efforts to mitigate the damage didn't work, and by 1994, one-third
01:13 of Pitcher's children had lead poisoning.
01:15 A mandatory evacuation was put into effect, with a 2008 tornado accelerating the town's
01:20 demise.
01:21 As of January 2011, only six homes and one business remained, the residents too stubborn
01:26 to leave.
01:27 Even though the town is gone, the hometown is still here.
01:31 "Everybody comes back to Pitcher.
01:32 They was born here, raised here, lived here."
01:35 Number 9.
01:36 Tomb of Mausolus, Turkey Over the centuries, each of the seven ancient
01:40 wonders of the world, with the notable exception of the Great Pyramid at Giza, were lost to
01:45 the sands of time.
01:46 One of the last to fall was the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, or the Tomb of Mausolus.
01:51 It was built around 350 BCE in modern-day Turkey.
01:55 The great tomb stood for hundreds of years, surviving both the invasion of Alexander the
01:59 Great and two separate pirate attacks.
02:02 By 1404, thanks to a series of powerful earthquakes, only the base of the tomb remained.
02:08 In 1494, an order of Crusader knights used the stones of the tomb to fortify their castle
02:13 walls.
02:14 Number 8.
02:15 Gilman, Colorado Once a booming zinc and lead mining town,
02:19 Gilman, Colorado is now the site of one of the worst ecological disasters in U.S. mining
02:23 history.
02:24 Mining operations poisoned the soil and groundwater with arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc.
02:30 The ecology of the nearby Eagle River was decimated, and the residents of Gilman were
02:34 horribly exposed.
02:36 In 1984, the EPA deemed the town uninhabitable and designated it a Superfund site.
02:41 The town was completely evacuated and abandoned, and cleanup efforts began.
02:46 Some progress has been made, as one section of the area was taken off the Superfund list
02:50 in 2023.
02:51 Gilman, however, was never repopulated and is now a ghost town.
02:55 Number 7.
02:56 Lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt King Ptolemy I commissioned the construction
03:01 of the Great Lighthouse at Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, and it was finished some
03:06 years later by his son.
03:07 Built out of limestone and granite, it had a furnace at the top to provide light to sailors
03:12 at sea.
03:13 The lighthouse stood for over a thousand years before it was damaged by a series of earthquakes.
03:18 After a powerful quake in 956, the lighthouse was repaired in Muslim style with a dome added
03:24 to its peak.
03:25 It would stand for a few hundred years until two more earthquakes sent the tower into the
03:30 sea.
03:31 Its remnants were discovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean in the 20th century.
03:34 Number 6.
03:35 Wittenoom, Australia The US isn't the only nation that lost towns
03:39 to mining disasters.
03:40 The town of Wittenoom once sat 880 miles northeast of Perth, Australia.
03:45 The Pilbara town was built for asbestos mine workers.
03:49 Small-scale mining was started by Tycoon Lang Hancock in 1936.
03:54 Today it's the home to the largest contaminated site in the southern hemisphere.
03:59 Blue asbestos mining began in the area in the 1930s, culminating with the construction
04:03 of a company mining town in 1947.
04:07 The deadly mineral gave thousands of workers and residents rare and often fatal diseases
04:12 such as mesothelioma.
04:14 Wittenoom was Australia's sole source of blue asbestos, but by 1966, the mine stopped being
04:20 profitable and was shut down.
04:22 The asbestos-induced health problems remained.
04:25 In 2006-2007, the town's official status was stripped and roads to contaminated areas were
04:31 closed.
04:32 We were called to a town meeting.
04:34 We were told that the government had decided that they were going to close the town within
04:38 12 months and we would all have to leave.
04:41 The town began its official closure in 2013.
04:43 By 2022, the town's last two residents departed.
04:47 Number 5.
04:48 Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
04:51 For most of recorded history, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake on Earth.
04:56 In the 1930s, the Soviets started diverting water from the Aral to irrigate cotton fields.
05:01 Unfortunately, the irrigation projects weren't always sound, with much of the water getting
05:17 lost.
05:18 In the 1960s, water diversion projects caused the lake to shrink.
05:36 Its reduction absolutely devastated the local fishing economy, destroying many towns situated
05:41 on its shores.
05:42 By 2007, the sea was a tenth of its original size.
05:49 Today, the former eastern basin is known as the Aral-Kum Desert.
06:01 The region is terribly polluted, causing massive public health issues.
06:05 Former Secretary General of the UN called the shrinking of the Aral "one of the planet's
06:10 worst environmental disasters."
06:12 Number 4.
06:13 Centralia, Pennsylvania
06:15 Centralia, Pennsylvania, once a sleepy coal town, now sits atop a perpetual conflagration.
06:22 In 1962, as one story goes, an attempt to clean the town's landfill led to an intentional
06:28 blaze.
06:29 The fire, unfortunately, spread to abandoned coal shafts beneath the town and have continued
06:50 to burn for over 60 years.
06:52 Even still, it took three decades for the town to fully evacuate.
06:56 By the late 70s, having failed to prevent the fire from spreading closer to the town,
07:02 residents were warned that Centralia was unsafe.
07:04 But most people stayed put.
07:07 The state bought all the real estate in the area in 1992 using eminent domain statutes,
07:12 and it was all condemned.
07:14 In 2013, seven residents remained.
07:17 They were allowed to remain until their deaths, at which point the rights to their land would
07:20 revert to the government.
07:21 With Centralia, it was just finally a matter of money.
07:24 What's going to cost more to dig this huge barrier and surround the coal and just buy
07:30 everybody out?
07:31 And so they decided to buy everybody out.
07:33 Today, Centralia is a ghost town, seemingly perched above a fiery gateway to hell.
07:39 Number three, Nimrud, Iraq.
07:41 Nimrud was an ancient Assyrian city in Upper Mesopotamia, founded over 3,000 years ago.
07:47 Long after the fall of ancient Assyria, the ruins of the city stood.
07:50 In the 1840s, archaeologists began excavating the city, discovering statues, palaces, temples,
07:57 and a great ziggurat.
07:59 Back in 2001, Nimrud attracted archaeologists from around the world.
08:04 The cuneiform inscriptions here are some of the earliest examples of writing anywhere.
08:09 Unfortunately, the city sits in modern-day Iraq, and in 2014, the Islamic State forces
08:16 surrounded the ancient city.
08:17 Using sledgehammers and bulldozers, they dismantle the building, finally attaching barrels of
08:24 explosives, and then it all goes up in a cloud of dust.
08:32 As part of their campaign to destroy any relics or historical artifacts deemed un-Islamic
08:38 or idolatrous, they blew up or bulldozed the entire area.
08:42 The forces destroyed 90% of the excavated city, annihilating 3,000 years of history
08:48 in just a few months.
08:49 The ISIS militants did not see this site as something to be cherished for its huge historical
08:54 and archaeological significance.
08:56 Instead, in their ultra-extremist view, this was a place of false idols and therefore to
09:02 be eradicated.
09:03 Number 2.
09:04 Fukushima, Japan
09:05 In 2011, Fukushima Prefecture in Japan was hit by a massive earthquake.
09:11 Unfortunately, Fukushima was home to a nuclear power plant, which suffered tremendous damage
09:15 during the earthquake.
09:16 It caused a tsunami which killed more than 15,000 people and led to a meltdown at Tepco's
09:22 Daiichi nuclear power plant.
09:26 Whole towns were washed off the map, leaving nothing behind.
09:32 Several reactors melted down, causing the first level 7 nuclear disaster since Chernobyl,
09:37 and one of the worst disasters to strike Japan since Nagasaki.
09:40 The containment effort was frantic, and hundreds of thousands of residents were temporarily
09:45 evacuated.
09:46 Public confidence in nuclear power collapsed.
09:50 The triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout made a huge dent in the
09:56 Japanese economy.
09:57 A large exclusion zone was created in the area.
09:59 In the dozen years after the disaster, parts of the evacuation order were lifted bit by
10:04 bit.
10:05 But many towns which have lifted evacuation are still struggling with decontamination.
10:10 Upwards of 5,000 workers are here every day, innovating and orchestrating the most complicated,
10:18 expensive nuclear cleanup in history.
10:36 Number 1.
10:37 Pripyat, Ukraine.
10:39 Founded in 1970, Pripyat, Ukraine was a boomtown of almost 50,000 by the end of 1985.
10:45 It had over a dozen schools, a mega hospital campus, stores, cinemas, restaurants, even
10:50 an amusement park.
10:52 A year later, it was completely abandoned.
11:04 Pripyat was the closest town to the Number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,
11:09 which suffered a horrific meltdown in 1986.
11:22 The entire town was swiftly evacuated.
11:25 It's a piece of Soviet history frozen in time.
11:28 Literally.
11:29 All the clocks are stopped at 1155, the precise moment that the power was cut.
11:34 Today, nature has reclaimed Pripyat, with deer, elk, moose, boar, and others returned
11:39 to the area.
11:47 Are there other sites of terrible disasters evacuated from our list?
11:51 Let us know in the comments below.
12:06 [music]
12:14 (upbeat music)
12:16 (upbeat music)