- 5/30/2025
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#Mysteries
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Short filmTranscript
00:01Satellites above an iconic American city make an alarming discovery.
00:07Vast ruins stand out in the middle of the Saharan desert.
00:12Drones uncover a puzzling stone mystery perched high in the Andes.
00:18And a massive modern metropolis in the Mongolian desert totally deserted.
00:23Where is everybody?
00:27Everywhere we look on our planet, there's evidence of the past.
00:32In nature.
00:34In buildings.
00:36In relics.
00:39Each holds a mystery that technology now allows us to see from above.
00:47What new secrets are revealed?
00:57Across the globe, more than half of the world's population, 4.4 billion people, live in cities.
01:04Each full of hidden stories and secrets that are best revealed with a view from above.
01:11Flying high above New York City, cutting-edge technology discovers something shocking.
01:16INSAR satellites, designed to detect variations in the Earth's surface, uncover an alarming increase in the rate of a bizarre and disturbing phenomena called subsidence.
01:31Subsidence is a geological term for the downward vertical movement of the Earth's surface.
01:37Basically, it's sinking.
01:40Hold on, did you say sinking?
01:42So, New York City is sinking?
01:46And they found this out from the sky?
01:48How's that work?
01:50INSAR satellites are especially good at detecting and measuring subsidence.
01:54With each pass over the Earth, they track ground deformation and changes that occur gradually over months or years.
02:02They can cover huge areas, making them ideal for urban environments like New York.
02:07Subsidence has been occurring where New York City now sits since the end of the last ice age.
02:13As the ice sheets retreated, the land once covered by the ice north of the city began to rise up,
02:19and the land just south of the ice, where New York City is today, began to sink.
02:23That slow response to melting of the ice sheets continues today at a rate of about one to two millimeters every year.
02:32Okay, so what's the big deal?
02:35Tracking from the skies, the satellites over New York find parts of the city are sinking at a pace of four millimeters a year.
02:43That means the Big Apple is going down far faster than expected.
02:48But what is behind this terrifying drop?
02:52What kind of forces can sink a city?
02:55Could this be caused by sinkholes?
03:01Over the past decade, we're seeing more and more of them across the world.
03:07And they're getting bigger, deeper, and a lot more dangerous.
03:13Sinkholes tend to form in cities for one of two reasons.
03:18Either a section of a street collapses because of a water main break or an old pipe giving way,
03:24or you get changes to natural water drainage patterns.
03:28In recent years, more and more sinkholes have left enormous gaping pits in downtown Manhattan.
03:35The middle of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side, and Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side,
03:41being two examples that happened only days apart.
03:44It's believed that these new multi-foot deep depressions are the result of the city's deeply outdated underground infrastructure,
03:51which has an average age of 66 years.
03:55And with 7,000 miles worth of water mains, that's a lot of old pipes posing silent threats.
04:03So could the increasing size and frequency of sinkholes be bringing down the city?
04:08Unlikely.
04:09Deep and dangerous as they are, these sinkholes alone are not enough to take down a city the size of New York.
04:15So what is happening in New York City?
04:19Perhaps there's a clue in another sinking city, almost 12,000 kilometers away.
04:24Shanghai, China.
04:26China's most populated city has dropped more than six feet since 1921.
04:34The result has been devastating flooding in the city and getting worse every year.
04:40The problem stems from Shanghai's rapid 19th century growth.
04:45Stretched to supply factories and drinking water to a population that by 1900 had tripled to more than 1 million.
04:52Groundwater that had supported the Chinese trading port quickly became strained.
04:58And it kept going.
05:00The problem got so bad by the 1950s and 1960s that the ground was sinking by four inches a year.
05:07The government took action in 1963, banning the overuse of wells.
05:12But the decline continued.
05:14By the mid-1960s, the city had sunk about 16 more inches.
05:19And it's only going to get worse.
05:22Official projections say water levels could rise several inches by 2050, threatening waterfront areas.
05:28Could this be happening to New York City?
05:32Is the Big Apples drinking causing it sinking?
05:36Is the loss of groundwater the problem?
05:38It's unlikely that this is just a groundwater thing.
05:42Groundwater management has been part of New York City's infrastructure for decades.
05:46Between 1996 and 2007, the city transitioned away from using any groundwater wells as part of their drinking water supply.
05:54So if it's not water going out, maybe it's water coming in that's the problem.
05:59The satellite view over New York City shows that the areas sinking fastest are the edges of the city, where New York lies less than two meters above sea level.
06:11Could the rising sea levels be pushing the city down?
06:15It's no secret that storms and hurricanes have increased in ferocity in the past decade with devastating results.
06:24In 2012, Hurricane Sandy killed more than 40 New Yorkers, destroyed approximately 300 homes, and left tens of thousands of people without power.
06:35In 2021, Hurricane Ida left more than a dozen people dead in New York City, many after they were unable to escape flooding basements.
06:46In New York City, sea levels have risen a foot over the last hundred years.
06:51That's a rate of about 1.2 inches per decade.
06:55That may not seem like a large increase, but the implications are huge. Sea level is expected to rise anywhere from 8 to 30 inches by the 2050s, and as much as 15 to 75 inches by the end of the century.
07:08Are rising sea levels destined to consume and sink New York City?
07:14Well, rising sea levels are very much a threat. A recent study of 99 coastal cities around the world found that subsidence, the sinking of the ground, may pose a bigger problem than sea level rise.
07:28Why? Because most cities surveyed, the land is subsiding faster than the sea levels are rising.
07:35So what's causing this increase in subsidence?
07:39Perhaps a clue lies closer to home, over 1,000 kilometers away in Chicago.
07:48Scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago have discovered that increased temperatures underground is making Chicago's clay soil contract, causing the windy city to sink.
08:00What they discovered is that the heat escaping from basements, parking garages, sewers, tunnels, other underground infrastructure is actually shifting the landscape.
08:10And it's causing Chicago to slowly, but definitively, sink.
08:15Much of Chicago was built on a glacial lake bed, which means very clayey soils.
08:21This type of soil can swell when heated, causing buildings built on top of it to settle faster than normal.
08:28The study showed that the ground could swell something like 12 millimeters and the structures could sink something like 8 millimeters.
08:36And they may not sound like very much, but those small changes can be devastating for buildings that are not designed for that kind of movement.
08:44Nobody talks about this, but it's a real thing. Scientists call it underground climate change.
08:51Could New York City be heating itself to destruction?
08:58In 2023, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Rhode Island decided to investigate.
09:05What the team studied were INSARS satellite images collected from orbiting satellites that actually map subsidence all across the city.
09:14The results showed, as expected, that all of New York City as a whole is sinking one to two millimeters every year because of post-glacial relaxation.
09:23But, and this is the big part, they discovered that those parts of the city where big buildings are built on fill and sediment are sinking faster, up to four millimeters every year.
09:35Could New York City just be too heavy?
09:39To test this theory, the scientists calculated the collective weight of more than a million buildings in New York City.
09:48They estimated that New York City's buildings collectively weigh 1.68 trillion pounds, equivalent to roughly 1.9 million fully fueled Boeing 747s.
10:01And that's just the buildings. That's not the contents, the people, the vehicles, all that other stuff.
10:12To determine what part of the cities were bearing the most weight, the scientists divided the city into a grid of 100 by 100 meter squares.
10:20This allowed them to calculate the downward pressure caused by the weight of the buildings across the whole city.
10:26The research suggested that, indeed, the weight of buildings is causing increased subsidence in those parts of the city vulnerable to this immense pressure.
10:39The skyscrapers anchored to underlying bedrock in the upper parts of the city, not much of a subsidence problem.
10:44But the hundreds of buildings sitting on spongy materials like clay and artificial fill on the lower-lying edges of the city, those are very prone to compression.
10:54And it's important to remember that this is happening in a city where the sea level is projected to rise between 8 and 30 inches by 2050.
11:03This extra sinking factor increases New York City's vulnerability to coastal storms.
11:09The likelihood of parts of New York City eventually being permanently underwater is inevitable.
11:15The ground's going down and the water's coming up.
11:18At some point, those two levels are going to meet.
11:22Because we have rising sea levels and sinking buildings at the same time, this means that coastal flooding is going to happen a lot faster than predicted by existing models.
11:32It's a really scary projection, but thanks to what we now know, cities like New York can much better plan and actually prepare for the long-term impact of sea level rise and coastal subsidence.
11:44Revealing these hidden forces sinking New York City and other cities like it around the world, before it's too late, is only possible with a high-tech view from above.
11:58In the deep central Sahara, in the African country of Niger, a view from above reveals a sprawling, empty, ancient mystery.
12:12What the heck is this place? It looks like a giant ant colony.
12:20It looks like a small fortified city, but slap bang in the middle of nowhere.
12:27And it looks totally empty.
12:30Abandoned cities are not unusual in the desert.
12:34But most desert settlements found in this part of Africa are simple in their layout and scope.
12:40This one has fortified walls, watchtowers and passageways.
12:46This unusual site is called the Kassars of Jando.
12:50Built between 800 to 1000 years ago, the architects of this site have long been a mystery.
12:57No one knows who built it.
13:01It would have been an enormous undertaking.
13:03It would have required, you know, a lot of elaborate planning, a lot of skill, a lot of time to create what is a spectacular fortress in the heart of northern Africa.
13:14Why go to so much trouble to create a massive walled fortress like this in the middle of nowhere?
13:20What was it meant to protect?
13:22Why are the Kassars of Jado here?
13:24A clue to this mystery may lie with another abandoned desert city almost 3000 kilometers away.
13:32In the Golan Heights, where a view from above reveals the desert fortress of Nimrod.
13:38Like the Kassars of Jado, Nimrod lives empty and silent.
13:43Another walled city left to crumble in the sand.
13:45Dated as early as 30 CE, Nimrod was built to guard a major access to Damascus, a key center of trade on the trans-Saharan trade route.
13:56The trans-Saharan trade routes connected the Mediterranean coast to the West African savannah and the sub-Saharan region.
14:03These routes were used to transport a variety of goods, including gold, ivory, salt and slaves.
14:10It's impossible to overstate the significance of these routes in African history, really in world history.
14:20They were also a major source of cultural exchange.
14:24Traders brought goods, ideas and technologies from one part of the world to another, leading to the spread of religions, languages and other cultural traditions.
14:32One example of a technology that was introduced to Africa through the trans-Saharan trade routes is the camel, which was domesticated in the Middle East and brought to Africa by Arab traders.
14:44The camel, you know, was an invaluable tool for trade and transport in the Sahara Desert, as it's able to travel really long distances across the desert with minimal water and can carry heavy loads.
14:56So the use of camels completely revolutionizes trade and transport in the region and it also facilitated the growth of the trans-Saharan trade routes.
15:09At the peak of the caravan trade, the average caravan was made up of 1,000 camels and some caravans were as large as 12,000.
15:18Could this be why Jato is here, built as a fortress to protect a crucial trade route?
15:25It's possible because Jato was once smack dab in the middle of this complex network of trade routes all across Africa and the Middle East.
15:34It's perfectly situated on this busy route.
15:38The Kassars of Jato would have thrived as a bustling and prosperous center of trade.
15:42The city was so successful, it swelled to be the biggest of its kind. It would have been a jewel of commerce in the desert.
15:51It's sort of like an early Saharan Las Vegas.
15:55But if the Kassars of Jato were so big and so strong and so prosperous, then why did the city basically just disappear?
16:04Could a closer look at Nimrud from above reveal more clues?
16:08We can see several structures here that were clearly created to defend the city from attacking raiders.
16:16And Nimrud has a well-documented history rife with conflict and destruction, underlining the reality that a city this rich is a target for conquest.
16:25Nimrud withstood a lot of attacks, a lot of raids over the centuries, but it was finally sacked for good when the Assyrian Empire fell to a coalition that was led by Babylonia and Medea at the end of the 7th century BCE.
16:41Is that what happened to these grand and wealthy Kassars of Jato?
16:47Perhaps there's a clue almost 9,000 kilometers away in the Gobi Desert of Western Inner Mongolia with another abandoned desert city, Karakoto.
16:57Founded in 1032 CE as the capital of the Western Shai Dynasty, this city was also a thriving trade center located on an important trade route through Asia.
17:12But just like Nimrud, the rich city caught the eye of unfriendly invaders. It was captured by Genghis Khan in 1226.
17:19Karakoto actually flourished under Mongol rule. During Kublai Khan's time, the city expanded to three times its original size and was even mentioned by Marco Polo in his travel logs.
17:34Under the Mongols, the people were able to enjoy a peaceful existence for about 150 years. And that's until the Ming Dynasty turned up in 1372 and lay siege to the city.
17:47Now, no one knows exactly how Karakoto fell, but the most commonly accepted theory is that the Ming rulers diverted the Ejin River, the city's only water source that flowed just outside the fortress, thus denying the city's troops and inhabitants water.
18:03Is this what happened to the Khazars of Jado? Did an outside enemy wipe out the people here?
18:10It doesn't look like it. Because while the city was almost attacked in the 18th and 19th century by all these waves of nomadic raiders, it wasn't until the arrival of the French military in 1923 that the Khazars of Jado lost their independence.
18:27If the people of the Khazars of Jado were not starved out or killed by a foreign power, why and how did they disappear?
18:37How did this spectacular desert city end up becoming a ghost town?
18:44An answer may be found just over 1,600 kilometers away in Mali, home of a legendary Saharan city, Timbuktu.
18:54Timbuktu.
18:55Once dubbed the city of gold, Timbuktu was a prosperous commercial hub for the ivory, salt and gold trades. It was also a hub for the slave trade.
19:07Timbuktu is still going today, but barely.
19:11Timbuktu is struggling to survive. And it's this modern struggle that holds a crucial clue to the downfall of the ancient Khazars of Jado.
19:23It's being eaten up by the desert.
19:26When it was built in 5th century BCE, Timbuktu, like Jado, thrived in a lush, livable landscape.
19:34And now, the desert is moving in, and the city is suffering from rapid desertification.
19:39Desertification is an increasingly widespread problem as climate change modifies weather patterns, leaving people to deal with hyper-arid conditions.
19:48The Sahara Desert is no exception. Scientists have observed that in the last century, the Sahara has expanded by 10%.
19:56And the problem is especially bad in Timbuktu, in Mali. The Sahara there is expanding at a rate of 48 kilometers every year.
20:05So could a similar thing have happened to the Khazars of Jado?
20:10It's possible.
20:13These ruins are 800 to 1,000 years old, and that means that they were built at a time when this part of the Sahara was much wetter.
20:21And just like Timbuktu, the relentless desert swallowed Jado.
20:28So it's very likely that what pushed people to abandon Jado was the lack of a clean water supply.
20:34You had this lush landscape, and then it all turned into desert. And that environment was just too harsh for humans.
20:40Jado was then pretty much unlivable, and by the early 1900s, it was abandoned.
20:47The people are long gone, but the Khazars of Jado were so well constructed that the abandonment of this city did not mean it was destroyed.
20:57Isolated from the outside world and built to last, the great Khazars of Jado stand tall today.
21:05A long forgotten ghost city, its secrets uncovered by a view from above.
21:12On the densely forested slopes of the eastern Peruvian Andes, over 600 kilometers north of Lima, a view from above reveals an ancient wonder.
21:27Sitting high on a mountain ridge, 3,000 meters above sea level, this mysterious stone site is known as Quelap.
21:36Look at that wall.
21:38This epic structure surrounds all of a length of over 1,000 meters, and in some places stands 20 meters tall.
21:50It's constructed from limestone blocks, some with an estimated weight of 3 tons. That's as heavy as a hippo.
21:59That wall is on the scale of a fortress. Is this structure an abandoned military base? Or the site of an old castle?
22:09Is Quelap the ruins of a fortified city?
22:13Even though it may look as a defensive construction, we have to take into consideration that there is no parapet.
22:21OK, so if there's no parapet like you'd see around a fortress, what about that huge long wall? Isn't that also a classic fortress feature?
22:32In some parts, the surrounding wall is 20 meters high. In other parts, it's only six.
22:39Some parts of the wall are far too low to provide any protection.
22:43And there's something else missing at Quelap, something crucial to survival.
22:49There's no water inside.
22:52Water has to be brought from the springs that we have around Quelap or from the river.
22:58So, knowing that there's no water reservoirs, no springs inside, we can completely disregard the idea that Quelap was a fortress.
23:08So, what is this place? A few from above reveals a network of strange stone circles across Quelap.
23:17Could these mysterious rings provide any clues?
23:21Did they hold water? Is this like an ancient spa? Or were they food storage structures like modern day farm silos?
23:28Those stone circles are really intriguing. Maybe they have some sort of ritual purpose?
23:34Perhaps clues can be uncovered halfway across the world at Mycenae in Greece, where a view from above reveals another set of mysterious stone circles.
23:48Excavations at Mycenae revealed that these large stone circles are grave sites.
23:54Both circles contained skeletons from the royal families accompanied by a treasure trove of their personal stuff.
24:01So, could the strange stone circles at Quelap have been part of a burial site like we see at Mycenae?
24:08Could they be tombs?
24:10Investigations at Quelap have uncovered a clue. Human remains.
24:14That is definitely related to the importance to venerate our grandfathers and great grandfathers even after they have died a long time ago.
24:30So, if human bones were found in these circles, these must be the remains of tombs.
24:37But a closer look at these circles reveals something unexpected.
24:41There's evidence of some kind of wooden structure where they could put the bed, where they slept, and also where they can store other goods.
24:55Then we have the kitchen area where the fire is located.
25:02It's basically a multifamiliar building. It's a circular construction that has a diameter that can vary between 5 and 10 meters.
25:12There's some characteristics that are always inside these huts.
25:16The tomb, where they kept some bones of their ancestors, is usually located in the center of the building.
25:24There are more than 400 of these multifamily houses in Quelap.
25:30If we make the math with the amount of people that can live in one of these huts, we are talking about, at its height, a population of around 2,500 people living in Quelap.
25:47So, if those circles were once houses to a lot of people, who were they?
25:53A wider view from above reveals another clue, a dramatic rectangular structure.
25:59This one is the biggest building in Quelap. It's called a Cayanca.
26:05It's a symbol of power of the Incas.
26:09Finding the ruins of a Cayanca is like finding a giant sign that says, the Inca were here.
26:13It's an unambiguous stamp that this place was definitely part of the Inca Empire.
26:19So, did the Inca build Quelap?
26:22Quelap isn't very far from the world-famous Machu Picchu, which was built by the Inca.
26:28Is this another one of their creations?
26:30According to the radiocarbon datings that we have, Quelap was built around 680.
26:37Machu Picchu is dated to almost a thousand years later than that.
26:43So, Quelap was built long before the Inca started up.
26:46But if the Inca aren't behind this ancient site, who is?
26:50Quelap and all the settlements around were built by the Chachapoya culture.
26:55Chachapoya is a generic name that the Incas started using for the people that live in this huge area of approximately 200,000 square kilometers.
27:10There's a lot of mystery surrounding these people and their culture.
27:16We know they thrived in a region of northern Peru from about 900 to 1400 CE.
27:22But they didn't have a written language, so much of what we know of them comes from studying the ruins they left behind.
27:29But wait, if the Chachapoya built Quelap, then what's with all the Inca stuff here?
27:36From 1438 to 1533, the Incan Empire grew rapidly, becoming the largest empire ever seen in the Americas.
27:46As they expanded north through Peru, the Inca conquered Quelap and ruled over the Chachapoya people.
27:52But around the mid-16th century, Quelap was suddenly abandoned.
27:59Why would the mighty Inca Empire go to all the trouble of conquering this place, putting up all these buildings, and then just abandon Quelap?
28:10Perhaps there's a clue more than 12,000 kilometers away, near the Sea of Galilee, with another abandoned city, Gamla.
28:18Gamla.
28:20Gamla has plenty in common with Quelap.
28:23A defensive stone wall, residential housing, and dedicated space for rituals and celebration.
28:29Like Quelap, Gamla was a thriving city.
28:33But in the first century, Roman soldiers attacked, leaving destruction in their wake.
28:41Was Quelap abandoned because it was invaded?
28:44Is this what led to Quelap's abandonment?
28:47That's exactly what happened here.
28:50In the mid-1500s, the Spanish conquered the area and ended the Inca's 70-year reign in Quelap.
28:57The conquered Inca and Chachapoya were rounded up, and Quelap was abandoned.
29:03Since then, Quelap has stood frozen in time, an ancient testament to a once mighty city.
29:08But now, the view from above reveals Quelap has a more modern mystery to be solved.
29:15One of the mysteries of La Fortaleza de Quelap is the collapse of the southern perimeter wall in 2022.
29:22A huge stretch of this giant wall, almost 30 meters long, simply gave out.
29:27People immediately began to ask, if this monument is a thousand years old and has withstood time, why is it falling down now?
29:38What modern phenomena could be causing this kind of damage to the wall?
29:42Is Quelap a victim of natural forces?
29:47Peru is located in the Ring of Fire, where more than 80% of the world's largest earthquakes occur.
29:53The Ring of Fire is this giant belt that wraps around the Pacific Ocean, where lots of our planet's tectonic plates meet.
30:00When they slip beneath each other, that's when you get all kinds of earthquakes.
30:05Two earthquakes did hit the region in 2022, but neither were strong enough to cause this level of destruction.
30:13So we can cross earthquake damage off the list.
30:16Why else would the wall at Quelap come down so quickly, especially after standing strong for centuries?
30:25Perhaps the collapse of the wall was caused not by outside forces, but instead forces within.
30:34We have elements here, some clues to solve the mystery of the history of the collapses here.
30:41Water has accumulated behind this wall.
30:44It's been turned a little bit into a dam, and this interior core made of mud and stone has gone from solid to be a little more plastic.
30:54And it's sitting on a sloping terrain, so it begins pushing down.
31:00And the perimeter wall, however solid and massive it is, cannot hold the weight of this plastic core.
31:07And this is how the collapse has happened.
31:09We have solved one mystery.
31:13Now we have confirmed that water infiltration is the ultimate cause of the collapse of the perimeter walls.
31:19But obviously another mystery remains. Why now?
31:24What could possibly cause this wall that stood strong for a thousand years to just start crumbling?
31:30Scientists believe the cause of this problem comes from above.
31:40Because of the great amount of precipitation in this area, one of the main theories is the infiltration of rain water.
31:48Rain? That is the culprit. I can see how an earthquake might cause damage like this. But rain? Is it really that powerful?
31:58The rain system here is very heavy, perhaps up to 3,000 millimeters a year.
32:07But why now, after a thousand years, is rain such a threat to the wall and all of QALAP?
32:13So we use data from some weather stations and mostly satellites to reconstruct the patterns of precipitation for the last four decades.
32:26And that was a real discovery. The precipitation has been growing over time.
32:31It's about four percent higher today than it was in the 1980s.
32:37And out of seven historically high precipitation months in those 40 years, four occurred in the last five years.
32:45So there is an increasing trend that is becoming more critical in the last few years.
32:50One year after the collapse of the wall, Peru is experiencing what's called the coastal El Nino, a weather event that's expected to bring more torrential rain to the area.
33:04The amount of water that is receiving today due to climate change may be exceeding its capabilities.
33:12Recent satellite imagery has revealed that the surface water off the coast of Peru is about six degrees higher than normal.
33:21When you've got warm water like this, it adds heat to the air, which means it can hold more water, which means bigger rainfall.
33:29And bigger rainfall means more water is getting into the core of QALAP's wall.
33:34If we don't mitigate the infiltration, the core is going to become plastic and push the perimeter walls out and the whole monument is going to collapse.
33:47It's a race against the clock. Can you figure out how to protect the site before the next round of catastrophic rain?
33:54It would be such a tragedy if the site of QALAP washed away.
33:59There's so much history and still so much to be discovered there.
34:02Scientists are determined to preserve this magnificent city, and thanks to their research, they now know what needs to be done.
34:12We should be mitigating the infiltration, and when that has stabilized, then we can reconstruct the perimeter walls with the goal of preserving this for future generations, for everyone to enjoy.
34:23A mystery solved, and a discovery that could help save an ancient city, all with a view from above.
34:32High over the arid plains of northern China, in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia, a view from above reveals something unexpected.
34:44It looks utterly abandoned. What happened here?
34:54It's totally empty. Where did everyone go?
34:57It totally looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
35:00The official name of the city is Kangbashi Newtown, but it's often referred to by the area in which it's built.
35:09Ordos.
35:10The story of Ordos begins in the early 2000s, when the Chinese government began to build the city in the Ordos desert, spending $1 billion.
35:21Ordos was designed to provide everything a modern city could possibly need or desire, all for a population of at least a million people.
35:30So, where are they? Where are all the people?
35:35It looks apocalyptic. Like something just wiped everyone out.
35:40Was this city emptied by a sudden massive disaster?
35:44Perhaps a clue can be found more than 6,000 kilometers away in Ukraine.
35:49Home to one of the biggest disasters in modern times.
35:52On April the 25th and 26th, 1986, a faulty Soviet reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded.
36:06As the radiation spread through the air, it covered more than 40% of Europe.
36:13Today, almost 40 years later, there is still a 30 kilometer exclusion zone around the plant.
36:18Scientists estimate this zone around Chernobyl will not be habitable for up to 20,000 years.
36:27It looks eerily similar to Ordos.
36:30All these empty buildings, sort of frozen in time and empty.
36:35Did a similar disaster happen to Ordos?
36:40No records exist that Ordos suffered anything like Chernobyl.
36:43The city isn't a designated danger zone and is actually perfectly safe to live in.
36:49In fact, this region is quite prosperous.
36:52I mean, yes, it's essentially a desert, but the landscape is rich in resources, particularly coal.
36:58And that's why Ordos was built here.
37:01A coal boom in the early 2000s compelled the local government to splurge on this new development.
37:05So if Ordos is considered a completely safe place to live, and it was supported by a rich industry, why is it empty?
37:15There may be a clue far to the southwest, in Namibia, in another abandoned desert city.
37:25Once a prosperous diamond mining town, Coleman's Cope was abandoned when the diamonds ran out, and better resources were found elsewhere.
37:32And ever since, the fast moving Namibian desert has been closing in and literally swallowing up the town.
37:39Satellite observations found that the average rate at which dunes in this area moved ranged from 7 to 32 meters per year.
37:46The Coleman's Cope is not alone. The Namibian desert has been swallowing more than just towns.
37:54One of the most famous examples of the desert's power to consume can be found over 400 kilometers away, on Namibia's skeleton coast.
38:06The waters off this place are famous for their strong currents, dense fogs, and treacherous sand banks that constantly move.
38:14These extreme climatic conditions, when combined with strong sandstorms, have been considered the cause of the sinking of over a thousand ships.
38:25The eerie remnants of long-lost ships and stranded sea creatures lie scattered across this desolate landscape.
38:34It's something like this happening to Ordos.
38:38Is Ordos being buried by sand?
38:40A view from above shows that Ordos is on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
38:46The fastest growing desert in the world.
38:50Between 1975 and 2017, China's deserts expanded by an astonishing 21,000 square miles.
38:59That's equivalent to more than 10 million football fields.
39:05The catalyst for this is deforestation.
39:08All the upheaval and removal of huge ancient roots means the soil isn't held together and is more vulnerable to natural wind erosion.
39:16China has tried planting trees to hold back the desert with a green, great wall.
39:22But a fifth of the trees planted so far have been planted in places they don't naturally grow, so they've already died.
39:28So, is the fast approaching desert what forced people to flee the city?
39:35But a view from above reveals massive reservoirs supplying Ordos City.
39:40So, while there's no question the desert is expanding, between the solid modern buildings and the giant reservoirs, it's unlikely that people would think the approaching desert was a problem.
39:53So, if people didn't flee because they feared being swallowed up by the desert, then why?
39:58What turned the massive city of Ordos into a ghost town?
40:05It doesn't appear that the city was abandoned because of some kind of disaster, man-made or natural.
40:13So, where is everybody?
40:15Perhaps an answer to this mystery lies more than 1,000 kilometers away, in another strange city in China.
40:21Oh, that is bizarre. I mean, just look at that. I mean, it's a total replica of an English town, complete with pubs and old-time English architecture.
40:36This just gets weirder and weirder.
40:40This is Thames Town. Created in 2006, the town was meant to be home for the thousands of people who live and work at nearby universities.
40:49The city was expensive to build, an estimated $635 million, and expensive to live in. Too much so, in fact.
41:00Thames Town was almost as expensive to live in as London itself. Now that is saying something.
41:07It's bonkers, really. I mean, how much money did they think people who live and work at universities make?
41:14In the end, the government only managed to get a few thousand people to live there.
41:19And Thames Town is not the only time this happened. Another city built to look like Paris, France also failed because no one could afford to live there.
41:29So, is this what happened to Ordos? Is this massive city virtually empty because no one has enough money to survive there?
41:38I think we're getting warmer. It cost well over a billion dollars to build Ordos. That meant developers needed high real estate prices to get a return on their investment.
41:50But people didn't sign up in droves the way the builders thought they would. So the developers were forced to scale back plans for a population of one million people. But the actual population only reached 100,000.
42:02And so you have, what, 100,000 people being asked to make up the shortfall so developers can recoup their losses? Not a great plan. This drove the prices of everything through the roof.
42:14And it got worse. At one point, property prices plunged so badly that many developers went bankrupt.
42:23The Ordos project essentially fell flat on its face. You just couldn't get enough people living there to sustain it.
42:32Looking over the city, it's easy to see why the unfinished houses and the vast, empty, dusty blocks of a city with insanely expensive real estate and impossible cost of living didn't exactly attract droves of families.
42:49The one thing that did make a difference was education. Over the past several years, China has worked hard to make Ordos more attractive. The most successful of these efforts was bringing in good schools.
43:02Education is highly valued in China. And the promise of access to good schools has started to lure families to Ordos.
43:09Slowly, the city is coming back, but it is still nowhere near the epic metropolis it was designed to be.
43:18Ordos is the ultimate lesson in arrogance and greed in the desert.
43:22An epic urban folly revealed only by a view from above.
43:28From a modern metropolis dangerously close to the edge. To an ancient walled city in the clouds. To a mysterious desert city losing the battle with nature. And an abandoned urban disaster.
43:47Mysteries of these great cities clearly uncovered. With a view from above.
43:53fueling for power reserve.
44:03In place the way they have to be visited.
44:06There's so many places where they have to get
44:17in their land.
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