What is the most impressive engineering feat by animals?

 You know you’ve built something significant when it is spotted via satellite imagery.

What you are looking at is the largest known dam to be built by beavers. It spans 850 meters wide. It was discovered via Google maps.

To date, only one person has been to the location, and only spotted one active beaver at the site—though there are likely several others working to maintain this huge dam. ( Source: The largest beaver dam on Earth can be seen from space. Daniel Martins)

Beavers were nearly hunted to extinction in Canada due to the fur trade but are making a comeback thanks to conservation efforts.

And yes, beavers can be a nuisance:

But they are engineers at heart, assessing and then gathering the correct resources to build housing for their families.

Beavers build dams to stop streams, creating a small, quieter pond for their homes. These ponds become wetland ecosystems that are good for the environment. (Although they do occasionally cause a flood on a golf course.)

They are extremely industrious, rivaling ants in output, working day and night to alter their surrounding environment, sometimes altering the path of entire river systems.

These huge dams last a long, long time and can be seen from up in space. Not bad for a bunch of rodents.

What feat of engineering have you found absurdly brilliant?

 On the 81 motorway, which runs from the Swiss border to Stuttgart, at a certain point an abnormal tower appears on your right : it is the test tower for

Thyssen Krupp

's high-speed elevators

, with cabins that reach speeds of up to 18 m/s.

The 246m high tower also has a

240-ton

mass damper and is entirely covered by a “fabric” made of

Teflon and fibreglass , which in addition to protecting the structure from temperature changes, is positioned in such a way as to dampen the effect of the wind.

At the top there is a conference room and a platform from which to observe the beautiful surrounding panorama of Baden-Württemberg.