One for aendr and sonicdrift

This isn't a ship going through icy water; it's the wake in the clouds where the Roaring Forties hit Bouvet Island, a medium-sized volcano conveniently located a thousand miles from one of the less-visited parts of Antarctica.

Behold, the mighty hexagon farms of Papua New Guinea

This is the kind of region in comparison to which the middle of nowhere is a cosmopolitan metropolis.

It's on the south coast of the south-eastern tendril of Papua New Guinea, in the province of Milne Bay which you will not have heard of, roughly between the towns of Abau and Alotau which you will not have heard of. Probably easiest reached by a two-day trip in a medium-sized boat along the coast from Port Moresby, though there may be pirates. There are bits and pieces of roads, but the rivers are big enough that they don't seem to be bridged.

I think this is an oil-palm plantation, and I think the ten-metre-wide tin huts on 25-metre centres are the houses of the workers. Each medium rectangle is a twelve-hectare plot. As you scroll around, you'll find lots of other large patches of land nearby set out as demonstrations of different kinds of graph paper.

I get lost in Papua New Guinea merely scrolling over it in google-maps; I dread to think what it's like on the ground.

I'm surprised quite how much of PNG has images at one-metre resolution; maybe there's an NGO out there interested in deforestation and with a large IMINT budget. The satellite imagery pricing I can find on the Web is $8000 for a single picture of 272 square kilometres at three-metre resolution.