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Using Google Earth to Find Ancient Cities
An anonymous reader writes "A story in the online site of the Aussie science mag Cosmos discusses how archaeologists are using sophisticated satellite images to find previously undiscovered cities. What 's really cool is how some are simply using Google Earth — and discovering all sorts of previously unknown sites!"
I RTFA and as a scuba-diver I'm curious if this technology can be used to detect underwater structures?
...I came across Google Earth was in September 2005, and I remember what led me to it was a story about Italian person finding old Roman ruins while discovering some 'formations' near his home village
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/radar/sircxsar//ubar1.html
they found a biblical city called ubar in oman this way, by tracing the minute traces left by ancient caravan roads only visible by certain radars on a huge scale
no lost ark, but apparently this is where all that weird stuff called frankincense came from
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Yes." She pointed to the screen. "But don't be deceived by what you see here. This satellite image covers fifty thousand square kilometers of jungle. Most of it has never been seen by white men. It's hard terrain, with visibility limited to a few meters in any direction. An expedition could search that area for years, passing within two hundred meters of the city and failing to see it. So I needed to narrow the search sector. I decided to see if I could find the city."
Find the city? From satellite pictures?
"Yes," she said. "And I found it."
They used radar to map almost the entire earth. Mission Site http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/mission.htm
"SRTM acquired enough data during its ten days of operation to obtain the most complete near-global high-resolution database of the Earth's topography."
The data is very accurate and they released a version of the data to the public. Apparently, there is a much more accurate classified version of the data. I'm sure they could find all sorts of things with this database.
Note, they also used the ground-zero/oceans to calibrate the device on every orbit of the earth which means it doesn't penetrate into the water.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
It is actually easy to find candidates, but how about travelling to mexixo? http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=20.558767,-88.630174&spn=0.003541,0.005021&t=h&z=18&om=1 This could be anything, but an ancient structure is one of the possiblilities. MB
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any technology such as this is invaluable to us archaeologists. You see, these days archaeologists are loath to put their WHS trowels in the ground for a simple reason: archaeology is the unrepeatable experiment. Unlike most sciences, you cannot go back and recover from any mistakes. Once it's up, it's up and that's the end of that. Untold valuable sites have been irreparable screwed up by previous clumsy excavations and thousands of artefacts have horribly degraded due to us not really understanding the conversation process. It's really only a miracle of fate that Howard Carter found Tutankhamen's tomb when he did - a few years before and most what of he discovered would be remembered to us only by grainy sepia photographs. Still, even with the reasonably modern techniques and equipment at his disposable a lot of damage was done and like a forensic site, much of the evidence has been contaminated.
Archaeological investigations these days tend to be for emergency purposes. Or in layman's terms, someone's building a motorway through an iron age hill (as in Ireland), or someone found a Roman bathhouse while pile driving the foundations for an office block. To be fair the latter shouldn't happy as archaeologists are normally called in to do a preliminary investigation before construction, at least in archaeological sensitive places such as London, Paris etc. It's pretty hard to get money for pure archaeology now. Mostly because governments would rather fund other, more pragmatic research fields and secondly because modern archaeologists are a squeamish bunch - if something's sat in situ for two millennia without any problems it can afford to wait a decade or more until adequate funding and a conservation strategy are in place. Nowadays most of the glory is going to the geophys guys and not Indiana Jones.
For this reason any methods which can provide any insight, no matter how small, are gaining ground. Really, despite what most people think of archaeologists we're not treasure hunters. We're trying to piece together the past piece by piece. What we're looking for is not lost cities, but rather more mundane artefacts like field boundaries, foundations, lost turnpike roads between settlements etc. Google Earth maybe good at this sort of thing, maybe even for smaller structures too and maybe very handy when trying to piece together larger landscapes. You're probably not going to find Eldorado though.
I've an interesting anecdote along these lines (no pun intended).
The people I work for are somewhat floofy new-age spiritualists. During my first week at this job, they had some 'feng-shuei' person over with a pair of straight metal rods with little right-angle bends at the ends for handles - "dowsing rods" - to detect where the "magnetic ley lines" of the building were, and thus how to align the furniture. Said person would walk around the building, "dowsing rods" in hand, and every so often then would swing together, indicating that they had passed over a "magnetic ley line". Needless to say I was highly suspicious of the accuracy of such crude equipment and methods in detecting such subtle energies. After watching this for some time, the new-age consultant person finally left, and gave her "dowsing rods" to my boss to keep. I asked the boss if I could see the "dowsing rods", and she said sure, but what will I do with them, I don't know how to use them.
So I held them out parallel in front of me like the floofy new-age consultant had, stared at them intently, and - voila! The rods crossed! I relaxed my gaze and they became parallel again. I stared intently again and the rods crossed again. My boss was amazed! How was I doing that, she asked. And I replied, "I'm tilting my hands ever so slightly."
She was... disenchanted, I suppose is the word. Though it doesn't seem to have dissuaded her from similar beliefs, such as her fear of "EMFs... or EMRs or ELFs or whatever the bad ones are", coming out of the wiring in her bedroom. I guess some people just don't care to grok real physics, and prefer to see magic dangers and health-improving furniture arrangement strategies in this spooky electromagnetism stuff.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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What would be nice is if NASA were to let Google Earth overlay all this non-visible wavelength data right in Google Earth. I think that other uses can be probably be found for this technique, and other interesting insights might be gained, if more people could view Google Earth at infrared and other wavelengths. Archaeology for the masses!
Not a hell of a lot: http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/maps/googleMapLocation.php?lat=-22.050000&lon=125.010833
At least he got Australia right.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."