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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!"
Here goes:
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com.nyud.net/node/1764
Maybe we can find out the location of Dick Cheney's Undisclosed Location.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
I RTFA and as a scuba-diver I'm curious if this technology can be used to detect underwater structures?
Easy; National check of hospitals with shotgun wounds by bird hunters.
...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
Do these cities have StreetView yet? It could provide a vivid picture of what life was like in ancient times. :)
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
In just five minutes I found this weird ancient obelisk!
Obelisk
Wow! A previously unknown sphinx!
Sphinx
Some sort of ancient roadway system. It's a bit hard to make out.
Ancient trade routes
"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."
You are right to point at the older story -- we need to make a distinction. The scientific point here is the use of satellite imagery to locate old cities. To social point is that Google Earth has made satellite images infinitely more accessible -- you don't need to be part of NASA anymore.
Or just dangle an oil drenched sack of money on a stick.. he'll show up.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
...google earth now finds your keys
I read
"Indiana Jones and the Blue Screen of Death"
First impact craters ( How to Discover Impact Craters with Google Earth ), now ancient cities!?! I'm still looking for my car.
Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another. Magnetic deposits in the crust, auroras, the Earth's own main magnetic field and all kinds of things mean it's not completely improbable that lines of energy flow from one point of the globe to another naturally. The major magnetic field of the Earth from its rotating iron and nickel fore surely has fluctuations in it that cause energy imbalances. Those imbalances will be settled by moving electrons around.
That it's some mystical "mana" energy that flows from place to place is fantasy. So is the idea that the lines are permanently positioned and don't move as the fluctuations which cause the energy imbalances would cause the flow of energy to fluctuate too. The idea that a great deal of energy is included shows a basic misunderstanding of electricity since any large amount of energy would discharge into any sufficient path to ground. A nexus where two lines of energy meet but keep flowing past that point as two separate lines is pretty doubtful.
The whole ley line, nexus, and rift/gateway type of system is a great feature of fantasy fiction and role-playing games. There's no reason for scientists to bother investigating it IRL though. If someone could show some predictably repeatable phenomenon that could only be explained by magical energy of some sort, then there'd be some scientists willing to court the Nobel for finding evidence of that.
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!
The weirdest thing about those satellite images is that they are NOT satellite images.
Many people are under the mistaken impression that Google Earth ONLY uses satellite images. That's simply untrue, and anyone who reads the GE FAQ would know this.
Those photos are aerial mapping photos produced by an airplane flying "tracks" across the city. They are then stitched together to form a mosaic, and since this was done with public funds the images are available to google earth for a modest fee. Seattle has similar images.
Any time you see the sides of an object on google earth it is NOT a satellite photo.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Image stitching
Really? How come I can't see the thread marks? Oh, I bet they're using something like fishing line...
This guy's the limit!
The first usage of aerial photography for archaeological purposes dates back into the 1920's. Using aerial photography and radar for searching out sites of archaeological interest was covered in National Geographic back in the 1950's. I remember seeing in my dad's photogrammetry magazines from the 1960's, aerial photography services specifically advertising their availability for archaeological surveys. (As well as multiple articles in the magazines on that very topic.) A book of NASA terrestrial photography I own from the 1970's dedicates an entire chapter to the usage of satellite photography for archaeological purposes.
At best, Crichton independently reinvented a technique already well known in professional circles.
Going to Google Earth, which uses the same imagery... one finds multiple similiar sites in the general area, as well as the remains of roads. One also finds current roads, and recently logged areas, like this one (just a kilometer to the west of your site).
Zooming out shows even more of the same type of site scattered across an large area (roughly 12 km on a side). (As well as clear indications of even more such sites in the area(s) adjacent that are only available in lower res.)
A few kilometers to the southwest, one comes upon a town clearly surrounded by many such sites.
Conclusion: Your site is almost certainly the remmnants of a logging operation or field clearing.
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
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Did you ever see the movie "The Core"? It would be something like that, except less lame and far more problematic to fix. (Most likely whatever method you used to tap the energy from the core could simply be reversed, since electric motors are all capable of being electric generators and vice versa, so you wouldn't have to mount an exciting manned expedition deep into the Earth's mantle to fix it ala The Core. But, that would require that you supply even more energy than you've been taking out. Imagine if, when we ran out of oil, we not only had to find an alternative fuel source but had to spend it all on somehow creating new oil deposits, lest we all die from some resultant catastrophe. Where the hell are we going to get all that energy from, and why weren't we using it to begin with?)
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I think much of what people think of as magical is very often an oral and literary history of the misunderstandings and exaggerations of real, verifiable phenomena of a completely non-magical nature.
In the particular case of ley lines many possible phenomena like magnetic ores, auroras, swap gas, early morning fog over distant mountains, fault lines, weather fronts, and maybe even stratus clouds could have been seen as evidence of something we'd explain away in the days of science and skepticism. If you consider wind or water the sources of magical energy by their very nature, then the jet stream or large rivers become your ley lines.
The whole point is that people who engage in magical thinking aren't engaging in scientific thinking. There's no hypothesis. There's just belief in something and perhaps anecdotal evidence to reinforce the belief. They're not being bad scientists. They're being non-scientists.
So what are the observations? A compass goes wild along this side of this mountain, along pretty much a straight line (where the magnetite is). The air is sometimes cooler on that side of the street than this one (because it takes time for cool, dense air and warm, lighter air to mix at a weather front) when there are large storms. There are lights in the sky that dance and change color. There's a crack in the Earth, and great movement and destruction is unleashed from it (fault lines).
Now, over thousands of years, with little or no influence from science, how were the people seeing those things and talking about them supposed to explain them? The only point to be made about these explanations today is that we have a better understanding now and don't have to keep retelling the myths as anything more than myths.
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."