Top 5 Man Made Strangest Islands




Thilafushi, the Garbage Island
Today, a sodden mound of buried garbage caps the former lagoon Thilafalhu, situated just a few miles west of Malé, the capital of the Maldives. The 
facelift warranted a name change, so Thilafushi, the garbage island was born. It was an emergency measure adopted to solve Male's trash crisis. The island makers dug gigantic pits and used the excavated sand to build up the perimeter. They filled the pits with unsorted garbage, then dug more pits and so it has gone. The fact that the island's discarded water wings, key chains, plastic daquiri cups and innocuous waste is jumbled with lead-acid batteries, asbestos and other toxic materials has some environmental groups concerned. Heavy metals could leech into the water table or the sea, they say, where they could harm people, reefs and other marine wildlife.
Now, industrial plants lease the land above the garbage. 
Warehouses, boat manufacturers and methane bottlers are some of the operations underway.

Amwaj Islands, Bahrain
These islands of expensive 
residential real estate lie northeast of Bahrain, fronting the sea and artificial lagoons. They are exemplary both for their innovations in engineering and land ownership laws. When building it, construction crews fenced in the island's perimeters with miles of geotubes, hydraulically filled tubes of sand. And when the lots went on the market, the government made an exception and allowed foreigners to buy them. Previously, foreigners could only rent land.


Dubai's Palm Islands and Coastline
Dubai's coast has grown garish with stylized beachfront lots for the wealthy. To date, there are two palm-tree-shaped islands 
crowned with sandy crescent strips with a planned third one on the way. There's also an inaccurate world map of sandy plots arranged in an oval, collectively called The World, and an island built for the world's only seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab.
Jumeirah is the smallest palm island and the first one built. To make it, dredger ships pumped sand from the sea floor and spewed it out in an arc onto the site of the island's crescent breakwater. The builders covered it with an erosion-resistant cloth, then stacked layers of rocks on the sand. Then, assisted by GPS, they pumped sand inside the breakwater to carefully form the 16 fronds of the palm. The crescent is sliced twice with wide openings to allow the seawater to circulate and prevent stagnation

Floating Island on the Mur
The Murinsel, German for "Mur Island," is an upside down turtle shell in the river Mur in Graz, Austria. Its steel-latticed glass and vaguely geodesic shape invoke artists' renderings of the deep marine cities where our grandchildren will probably vacation some day. At night, the island glows blue like a billboard for the Tron sequel. It is 155 feet in diameter, topped with a playground and an
amphitheater. Under the waterline, there's a café and bar. It looks as if it's suspended between bridges to both of the Mur's shores, but it's actually on a floating platform.
The island is a cross-cultural endeavor: a New York-based architect, Vito Acconci, designed it to mark Graz's designation as the European Capital of Culture in 2003

The Uros Floating Reed Islands
Floating reed islands bear homes, schools and even a 
radio station on Lake Titicaca, which rides the border between Bolivia and Peru. Their inhabitants, the Uros, preserve an old-school artificial island-making technique that their predecessors employed for centuries. They bundle totora reeds—the stalks of the giant bulrush—into floating, shape-shifting masses that change as reeds rot and new ones are lashed on.
Reeds are the backbone of Uros construction. They bundle them to make their islands, homes, their cartoonishly curved boats and even their sails. Walking on the islands is like walking on a giant gummy bear, and if it's not patched well, a foot can go all the way through. Reportedly, the islands are the relics of a prehistoric military strategy: when invaders came, the Uros could slowly drift away.

             

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