Atlantis erased from Google Earth?

Google went underwater with Google Ocean three years ago, and their mapping efforts were said by some to have unearthed the lost city of Atlantis. Well, it seems that the mythological underwater civilization has been covered yet again, thanks to an update to the underwater maps after receiving new seafloor data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other groups who participated in the effort.

According to David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist, “The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data. UCSD undergraduate students spent the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders.” So Atlantis is now a blunder? Guess so, as the official explanation is, the grid that you thought was Atlantis, with a road network and all, is actually the result of overlapping datasets. I guess that’s that then – although hope springs eternal that Atlantis might eventually be unearthed, just like how Troy was discovered despite looking as though it was lost forever to mankind.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Google, Google Maps