Google Earth Used to Find Ancient Roman Villa

cavehobbit writes "Google Earth leads to an archeology find, according to a Nature article. From the article: 'Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river ...' What's buried in your back yard?"

Comments

The unexplored earth

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for the idea that the entire planet earth has been explored.

And what does it say about the sheer volume of data on Google Maps that this had been missed until now?

My backyard isn't in Google Earth

[Zatar]

My (parent's) house is in Ketchikan, Alaska. Google Earth just shows a big blurry picture of cloud cover. My friend outside of Fairbanks? Big blur. Vacation cabin in Michigan? Big blur.

I mean, the program is cool and all, but I'm really disappointed that it seems the only places you can see very well are the highly-populated/popular places that there's already lots of established pictures of anyway. I'd really like to be able to explore places I can't easily get to otherwise.

I have no idea if they plan to fix this or if anyone even bothers taking high-res pictures of places that aren't militarily interesting (or whatever criteria they use) but so far the program just seems to be a "hey, I can see my own house in the big city" novelty.

500m

[zoogies]

How do you miss something 500m long? Granted, the world is a big place, but I thought that SOMETHING would have found a great big 500m long object by now.

Re:500m

[ocelotbob]

Same way you miss the Nasca sand art. They seem like odd ditches until you get some perspective. That villa seems like it's just irregular enough to look like it's just another feature of the land. Too insignificant to do major earthmoving, so the farmer who works that piece of land just works around it.

Google Maps for future archeologists

[Nerdposeur]

If all these images are being archived, future archeologists will have a lot of interesting stuff to see. Any place that you want to know more about, just look up the images from the right year.

Another thing that will be awesome is to take imagery of a particular city, for example, and animate it over time to watch sprawl, decay, renewal, etc.

Re:my backyard?

[Steve Franklin]

Who knows, maybe you'll be the one to find evidence of a forgotten sea-faring neanderthal civilization no one knew about. Try to be a little more open minded.

Look at that resolution change!

[FooAtWFU]

Just a little ways over to the east you can notice that the satellite resolution drops off precipitously. If the satellite had just switched off a few seconds earlier (or is it on a few sconds later?) I guess that this villa would have remained unfound.

I'm also a little bitter because the satellite maps around where I live

are pretty lousy quality - and just a screen to the southwest, the resolution picks up again. Phooey.

The other thing annoys me is that they don't pixelate the image when you zoom in, they just cut it off. Check around here, for instance. It would be nice to have the general diffuse pixellated background anyway, if only to get a rough idea of the terrain when you're in Overlay mode. Notice also that if you zoom out even one step you can't get the little side streets anymore. No-fun at all!