Engineering

Incredible buildings, bridges, machines and structures: how they were built, how much they weigh and why they look impossible.

Shell’s Prelude: World’s Largest Floating LNG Plant

Shell’s Prelude, the world’s largest floating LNG plant, measures 1,601 feet long and displaces 661,000 US tons of water when fully loaded.

Hoover Dam weighs more than 6,600,000 tons of concrete and stands 726 feet high, with 650 miles of cooling pipe inside its curved arch-gravity wall.

Troll A, the tallest structure ever moved by people, rises 1,549 feet and was towed 124 miles in seven days to the North Sea Troll gas field.

The BelAZ 75710 mining dump truck holds 500 US tons, the weight of about 300 cars, in one bed yet cannot drive on ordinary roads.

Engineers moved the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse whole, rolling the brick tower 2,900 feet inland in 1999 in 23 days with no damage.

The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge holds the world record with a 2,023-meter main span between its towers, the longest of any suspension bridge.