For decades the Soviet Union sprayed anthrax, plague and tularemia over animals tied to stakes on a remote island in the Aral Sea. Then the sea drained away, the island joined the mainland, and the pits where the leftover spores were buried became an international problem.
On the Croatian side of the border with Bosnia, a Cold War airbase was cut into a mountain so that MiG-21s could be hidden, fuelled and launched from inside it. In May 1992 the army that built it blew it up, and the mountain has been quiet, mined and half forgotten ever since.
In a bowl of desert outside Albuquerque stands a wooden structure as tall as a twelve-storey building, built almost without metal so that a B-52 could be parked on it and hit with a simulated nuclear pulse. It was shut down at the end of the Cold War, and it is still there.
Bakić's 37-metre monument to the 1941 uprising once glittered with Swedish stainless steel above the forests of central Croatia. Now it is stripped, graffitied and carrying phone antennas, and a Netflix crew has filmed in it.
Kadykchan in Russia's far north-east was dug out of the permafrost by Gulag prisoners in 1943 to feed a power station. Then a mine explosion and a state decision left its flats empty and its streets silent.
In 1997 a 45-metre Gulliver was laid out on a hillside below Mount Fuji, tied down by Lilliputians, and four years later the park was dead. The bank behind it had collapsed, and the giant stayed where he lay for six more years.
Hidden in a Crimean mountain under 180 metres of rock, Object 221 was meant to run the Soviet Black Sea Fleet through a nuclear war. It was never finished, then looted, and now it may be back in military hands.
Along France's Atlantic coast, Germany built vast concrete bunkers for its U-boats during the Second World War. Bombers could not break them, and today they are museums, art galleries, naval stores and silent ruins.
Above Svalbard's Isfjorden, the ruins of Grumant mark a Russian and Soviet coal town that was evacuated in the war, shelled, rebuilt, and abandoned for good in the 1960s.
On the shore of Isfjorden, Colesbukta was the shipping end of a Soviet coal chain, and its ruins, a cabin museum and a lonely cemetery are still there.
Between Venice and the Lido, a small island once held plague ships, then a hospital and nursing home. It now stands empty, and the ghost stories told about it are much bigger than the documented history.
Inside the flooded crater of an active volcano in Antarctica, rusting oil tanks, an aircraft hangar and a cemetery mark where whalers, then scientists, tried to make a home.
In the 1960s a Canadian engineer bolted two 16-inch naval gun barrels together on the coast of Barbados and fired projectiles more than 90 kilometres into the sky. The project was shut down in 1967, and the gun is still there, rusting.
Built in the late 1960s for a secret US-British radar that never worked, the buildings on Orford Ness were given a second life as a giant medium-wave transmitter. For nearly thirty years its masts carried the BBC World Service across Europe, and now the same site broadcasts Radio Caroline.
On a Pacific island in the Marshall Islands, a concrete dome 115 metres wide covers a crater left by a 1958 US nuclear test, filled with contaminated soil and debris from the whole atoll. It was built by about 4,000 servicemen between 1977 and 1980, it has no floor liner, and the sea is rising around it.
Between 1943 and 1945 the Nazis dug into the gneiss of the Owl Mountains in Lower Silesia, using thousands of forced labourers to build seven underground sites. Nobody knows for sure what Project Riese, the Giant, was meant to be.
In 1962 a clean-up of the town dump set a coal seam alight. More than six decades later it is still burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania, a coal town that once had 27 saloons and now has a handful of residents, a church, four cemeteries and a street map with no one on it.
For more than three centuries Plymouth was the door to Montserrat. Then the Soufrière Hills volcano woke up, and between 1995 and 1997 the capital was emptied, scorched and buried. It is still the official capital, and still has no residents.
Henry Ford never saw it, yet he built a Michigan-style town on the Tapajós River to grow his own rubber. The trees failed, the workers rebelled, and the houses are now lived in by the descendants of the people he hired.
A railway worker picked up a stone in the sand in 1908, and within a few years a German-style town of ballrooms, ice and champagne stood in the Namib. The diamonds moved south, the people followed, and the dunes now fill the houses.
Founded by Swedes in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was a showcase mining town on Spitsbergen with more than a thousand residents. Mining ended on 31 March 1998, the people left within months, and the cold has kept the town almost as they left it.
Hashima is a six-hectare rock off Nagasaki that held 5,259 people at its 1959 peak, packed into concrete apartment blocks around an undersea coal mine. Mitsubishi closed the mine in January 1974 and the island was emptied by April. It is now a World Heritage site, and its wartime forced-labour history is still disputed.
Opened in 1981 on a peak in the Balkan Mountains, the Buzludzha monument was built by public subscription as the House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Its regime fell eight years later. The saucer-shaped hall has been stripped, weathered and, since 2018, closed, while conservators work to save its mosaics.
In the early 1970s Varosha was one of the Mediterranean's busiest beach resorts. In August 1974 its people fled the advancing Turkish army, expecting to return within days, and the quarter was fenced off. It stayed sealed for 46 years, and today only parts are open.
