Photos by Gunter Welz and Ray Millar, from NABS
布柳河仙人橋 - Xian Ren Qiao - Fairy Bridge. Despite it's impressively unimpressive English name, it is the world's largest natural arch, spanning somewhere around 400 feet. It towers over the Buliu River in a remote part of southwestern China's Guangxi province. Fairy Bridge is amazing, not only in the unbelievability of its geological presence, but for the circumstances surrounding its discovery by those outside of China.
The National Arch and Bridge Society (NABS) takes the credit for revealing the existence of the Fairy Bridge to the West in an official manner. It did not do this in the nineteenth century. Neither was the arch recognized in the twentieth. How was this titan arch first detected by a westerner? Using Google Earth.
One day in 2009, a dude from NABS named Jay Wilbur was poring over the contours of the digital globe and saw something that looked like a proper massive arch:
This led him to Panoramio here, where a Chinese photographer had uploaded his picture of the arch, confirming Wilbur's suspicion. Promptly, NABS organized an expedition to measure the thing. Their first attempt in 2009 failed (not sure why, but indicative of the difficulty of travelling in the region), but they were back out in a 7 person team just last October, with success this time. You can read the illustrated diary of their expedition here, if you want.
So far, NABS's efforts haven't seemed to have bolstered the reputation of Fairy Bridge outside of China much. Wikipedia's entry for the arch is humorously pitiful: described as the "world's largest natural ark", with zero images and only one link. For more fun, try this: type in "Fairy Bridge arch China" into Google Image Search. Then try "布柳河仙人橋" in the same field. The English name yields a grand total of 2 non-duplicate images of the actual place, while the Chinese name offers up pages of images.
I just can't get over the strange fact that this thing was first revealed to the wider world not by some kind of Fridtjof Nansen or Aurel Stein exploring on foot in the early twentieth century, but by a guy in a volunteer organization exploring through a computer in the early twenty-first. I like to think it's an effective rebuttal against all those who jadedly bemoan the fact that everything in the world has been already discovered, named, and de-mystified. In my opinion, there still is -and will always be- secrets of the landscape, cityscape, any-scape. Even when (or if) the natural world has been completely mapped, when the last inch of the remotest oceanic trench has been plotted, photographed, and tourist-ed, there will still be unknown aspects of places with which we are familiar and those we are not. Spaces will always hold their secrets, lurking beyond the boundaries of their existing descriptions in in word and image.