On the coast of Somerset in England, a machine towers over the horizon.
It is a crane, but not like any crane you have ever seen.
Its frame climbs higher than almost any building nearby.
Bright steelwork rises in a lattice against the clouds.
From miles away, you can spot it against the sky.
Up close, it feels less like a crane than a small factory.
People here have given it a friendly name, Big Carl.
And it is doing something historic.
The biggest crane on the planet
Big Carl is officially the largest crane on Earth.
Its real name is the Sarens SGC 250.
It was designed and built by a Belgian firm called Sarens.
At full height, it can stand around 250 meters tall.
That is taller than almost any skyscraper in Britain.
And it can lift a staggering 5,000 tons in one go.
That is the weight of hundreds of loaded trucks at once.
Picture lifting a small ship clean into the air.
No other land based crane comes close to its power.
It was the first of a bold new family of ring cranes.
It was made for jobs nothing else on Earth can handle.
Everything about it is built to an impossible scale.
And it moves in a very strange way.
A crane that runs on a ring
A normal crane sits on a fixed base or crawls on tracks.
Big Carl does neither of those things.
Instead, it rides on a huge circular rail laid on the ground.
The whole machine rolls around this ring as it works.
That ring is what keeps it balanced under vast loads.
A massive counterweight swings around to hold it steady.
The counterweight alone weighs thousands of tons.
It shifts position to match each load the crane picks up.
Without that trick, a lift this heavy would tip any crane over.
Getting Big Carl to a site is a colossal job in itself.
It arrives in hundreds of separate truckloads of parts.
Crews then spend weeks bolting the giant back together.
Only then can the real lifting begin.
A job only a giant could do
Big Carl was brought to a site called Hinkley Point C in England.
It is one of the biggest building sites in all of Europe.
There, crews are building Britain’s newest nuclear power station.
The plant is being built from enormous prefabricated pieces.
Whole chunks are made on the ground, then lifted into place.
This way of building is faster and safer than the old method.
But those pieces are far too heavy for an ordinary crane.
Some weigh hundreds of tons on their own.
They are the size of buildings before they even go up.
Only a machine like Big Carl can raise them at all.
So the giant crane became the heart of the site.
And its lifts are truly enormous.
What it lifts into the sky
Here is the scale of what Big Carl actually raises.
According to one report, it lifted a 575 ton steel ring in a single hoist.
That ring was 17 meters tall and 47 meters across.
These heavy rings stack up to form the thick wall around a reactor.
It also set a 245 ton dome on top of a reactor building.
That dome sealed the 44 meter tall structure from the weather.
In all, more than 600 giant sections will be lifted into place.
Each one slots together like part of a huge kit.
Piece by piece, the crane is building whole reactors.
Each lift is planned in advance to the last careful centimeter.
A single machine is raising a power plant skyward.
Nothing on land can match the feat.
The future of building big
Big Carl points to a new way of building huge things.
More and more, giant structures are made in big modules.
Cranes like this one lift them into place like blocks.
It cuts years off some of the largest projects on Earth.
Factories can turn out the parts while the site is prepared.
Then the crane simply lifts them into their final place.
When its work is done, the crane can be taken apart again.
Then it travels on to the next impossible job somewhere else.
According to one account, it has already broken its own lifting records.
The same drive to build clean power at scale shows up elsewhere, from a solar farm fox to the seals near an offshore wind farm.
For the moment, though, Big Carl still remains the undisputed king of the cranes.
And on the Somerset coast, it keeps reaching for the sky, one giant lift at a time.
