This short excursion being prompted by the not particularly relevant but striking image to be found in the piece at reference 1.
In particular, the hump with what appear to be close-set support columns, a hump which I would struggle to cycle over these days.
Google Images tells me easily enough that the image is of part of the King Fahd Causeway which connects Saudi Arabia to Bahrain. Wikipedia knows quite a lot about it. It was, for example, opened in the mid 1980s, so is no longer new. But where is the hump?
The region.
The causeway. Gmaps finds the causeway easily enough, but I am not much further forward as regards the hump. Not helped here by Street View being unavailable on the Saudi side, which might have given me a version of the opening image above.
Unusually, Gemini get hold of the wrong end of the stick to start with. Possibly because while there is only one middle island - the dumbbell left centre in the causeway snap above - there are several humps in the carriageway.
But with supplementaries, he gets the idea.
I fail to find anything like an engineering drawing of the structure as a whole, as does Gemini, but he does try to break the structure down into segments, embankments (on land and over shallow water) and bridges (at sea). But his numbering is not very consistent and his distances do not seem to agree with those on gmaps. I have attempted above to produce my own, not very satisfactory, diagram from his text.
The Saudi-Bahrain border is marked by the red dashed line, running through the middle island, aka passport island, entirely artificial.
The green spot marks where I think the big hump is located. There are other, smaller humps, but I have not located them.
Gemini is very keen to tell me that the construction is box girder - which went through a sticky patch in this country - and which accounts for the closely spaced columns. No big central span of the sort you would get with a suspension bridge.
He also explains that the Saudi's are very keen on privacy and security, which is why there is no gmaps there. It might also explain why no engineering style drawings seem to have leaked out into the public domain. Google did turn up a reference (4 & 5 below) to a study of long-term maintenance issues, but not the study itself - which probably did include the sort of drawings that I was looking for.
But he avoids answering a direct question about whether he can find drawings. He repeats a lot of what he had already told me, but does not like to admit defeat, to say 'no, I can't find anything like that'.
Conclusions
Gemini has not yet got fully to grips with dealing with spatial information. In which he is probably not helped here by the Saudis being a bit private.
References
Reference 1: Iran hits Amazon data centres in jolt to Gulf AI drive: First known military strike on a US hyperscaler rattles regional ambitions to build multibillion-dollar cloud facilities - Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Tim Bradshaw, Sam Learner, Financial Times - 2026.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Fahd_Causeway.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar%E2%80%93Bahrain_Causeway. Not to be confused with this one, which will link Bahrain to Qatar, in effect extending the first causeway to the east.
Reference 5: https://www.egis-group.com/projects/securing-the-future-of-the-king-fahd-causeway.
Reference 6: https://youtu.be/jVirY2YkQn0. Embedded in reference 5: some nice shots of the structure, but no diagrams. I associate to the sort of thing that the heavy end of what Messrs. Sandberg do - with my having once been part of the light end.
Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-matter-of-roads.html. The most recent outing for Messrs. Sandberg.





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