Chernobyl is obviously well-known for one particular thing, but as it turns out, the town is hiding things other than two-headed squirrels.
YouTuber Tom Scott has been documenting his trip around Chernobyl with a great series of videos, but this one is particularly fascinating. It tells the tale of the ‘Russian Woodpecker’, a gigantic Duga-3 radar array left over from the Cold War.
In an era before ubiquitous satellite coverage, tracking missile launches from over the horizon presented a unique challenge, with a unique solution: an over-the-horizon radar, which bounced a signal off the ionosphere to track stuff far away. To achieve this required a ton of power, and a radar array 300 feet tall, and 2,500 feet wide.
The Cold War ended (and a nuclear reactor exploded!), but the arrays were left in place, ready for intrepid YouTubers bearing drones to come explore.
[YouTube]
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