WP has an image of it[1] and states that it is a Potassium Chloride factory at Lop Lake[2]. It's not visible on Bing Maps[3], so perhaps it's relatively new.
I think that area is part of the Turpan basin which has been a salt mining zone for centuries. I'm totally guessing here, but the Google Maps images look like a massive salt evaporation facility.
If you zoom in, you can see it's not a single structure or building. Most of the area (all the blue parts) is some kind of liquid, probably water. Zoom in far enough and you can see buildings on the edges of the pools.
Follow the little blue line upwards from the structure and you'll see a dam clearly pumping water, and the canals extend up to around 50km.
The Map View also shows a large area around it as a huge lake, so I'm guessing they drained the lake. Still pretty impressive in my opinion.
Or evaporation mineral collection ponds or something of that nature. The facility in Wendover on the salt flats is pretty large too though there's no ponds like these images appear to show. There's lots mineral collection ponds like this in California and Nevada.
According to the thread on reddit people have posted about these on the internet up to 5 years ago. The most plausible explanation on the thread seems to be that the criss-cross pattern is a test range for autonomous cruise missiles, designed to mimic city streets.
Here is a quote from the thread:
"It is an optical test range for autonomous cruise missile targeting systems, to simulate the street grids of cities. If you check the scale of the grid on google earth (+40° 27' 6.89", +93° 44' 20.77") you'll notice that the grid is the size of several city blocks. If you look here (40.479272,93.47713) they have a fake airport painted out over ditches, creeks and inclines. There is also a paved runway short way away, with random bomb craters in it.
The round circle with the 3 jets in the middle is a blasting test range, used to test the dispersion, and effectiveness of explosions over a varying ranges." [1]
Generally large structures like this are related to mining as that is a process that can take large swaths of land and convert it into a few hundred thousand tons of the 'good stuff.'
That being said, the old MX silos could be seen from space but they were pretty clearly revetments and launchers connected by rail lines. Generally large infrastructure often gives away its intent which is why modern despots prefer building everything underground.
One of the comments suggest it was the result of lithium mining..."These sites clearly represent the process of lithium mining and extraction. Sedimentation trenches are dug to extract lithium iron phosphate to create batteries." Sounds reasonable.
Whenever anybody uses that phrase I can't help but think of David Attenborough. In "Planet Earth", there were at least a dozen things which "are so large, they are visible from space."
Check out this [1] post on the google earth forums from 2006. Has some more interesting ideas on what it could be, and potentially an answer for part of it. It also has a great KML (kmz) of the different features.
From [1]: "This Site was a Chinese missile test centre, and a lot of area is developed for tourists attraction. but some facility such as the fake runways are still under military control.
"1950s, this site was chose by Soviet scientists as the first Chinese nuclear weapon test site, but the Chinese authority refused this suggestion due to its small scale and location. and just used it as missile test facility."
Although, I'm not sure on the factuality of this statement, however has a link to a people.com.cn file about the area.
(A 1:20 scale model of the border between India and China? It's too small to train on directly, and it's too large to see all at once for higher-level planning.)
It seems like it might be a a good low-tech way (and possibly even with modern battlefield GIS available) to thoroughly familiarize mid-level and lower officers with the terrain. It's hard to overestimate the value of a good, physical sense of the land in a places that remarkably rugged. It won't replace local info on the ground, but I'd certainly rather go into a place like that with commanding officers who aren't trying to reconstruct chunks of the Himalayas in their head on the fly. If you've got the spare manpower, the space, and you're planning ahead... why not?
Someone needs to write a pattern matching algorithm to compare the voronoi-looking image to the street layout of various cities. Seems like it would be a 1:1 representation, given the size.
Dunno what that would indicate, but the results may be interesting...
Found this[1] as well while poking about - fairly tall structure, unique curved shape, nothing but a road, some outbuildings and some antenna masts for miles in any direction. Thoughts on what it might be?
Voronoi Polygons have been used in mining to estimate the reserves of valuable materials, minerals or other resources. Exploratory drillholes are used as the set of points in the Voronoi polygons
Interesting idea, but I don't see why they'd then construct a huge set of roads to connect every vertex. Or why they'd drill that many drillholes in less than a square km.
Having done business in China and knowing a little bit how some of the good people there think; my bet is that the square pattern(s) which looks like Voronoi diagram are just a Chinese version of the Crop circles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle. They like to do things in major scale in China.
Couple of the pictures were clearly geology/mining related and one is a military training area. No biggies.
My understanding is that NORAD can withstand megaton hits so long as they are > 1 mile away. With modern technology, it seems unlikely that NORAD would be missed by a full mile.
Doubt it. It's not uniform, there's no central tower, and retired jets would be a damn weird solar array component. My money would be on a radar or blast test site that's been abandoned.
These represent the layouts of streets in Washington,DC and lower Manhattan. They are testing their low cost, nuclear tipped, artificial intelligence controlled cruise missiles on simulated targets.
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=40.42761,90.793762&...