Our newspapers, especially the ones designed for the hard-of-thinking, have a few set stories guaranteed to sell copies. Health scares ("X gives you cancer"), anything about immigration ("They come over here, they take all our jobs") and the supernatural or pseudoscience are all popular. Today is no exception. The Torygraph, the Daily Fail, and even the Sun (with special guest reporter Plato) are all reporting on the discovery of the lost city of Atlantis in Google Earth:
A rectangular region "the size of Wales"(which is the official journalistic unit of area) has been found over 600 miles off the coast of west Africa:
My first thought was that there are a few engineers at Google having a laugh, and that this is a bit of an "easter egg". But looking at the rectangles, if it is meant to look like Atlantis it's pretty shite! It's also way too big. Wales has an area of 20,779km2. The heaving metropolis that is the Geater Los Angeles Area is 12,562km2. Is Atlantis really meant to be twice the size of Greater Los Angeles at a time when the population of the entire Earth can't have been much greater than the population of LA?
The scale is all out too. If we approximate the rectangle as 160km by 130km, then many of those "city blocks" are in excess of 10km wide. The "roads" must be 500m or wider. Now, in theory, the residents of Atlantis could have enjoyed nice wide avenues, but I think 500m is taking the piss a bit, don't you?
So if it isn't Atlantis, what is it then? This is when I wish I'd been listening more in my Geological Sciences B lectures instead of wishing I didn't have 9am lectures on a Saturday morning. Igneous rocks can form spectacular cracks and joints. Giant's Causeway is a wonderful example of hexagonal columnar jointing. But can we get jointing on such a large 10km scale or more? I'm looking forward to seeing what my more hard-rock geobloggers have to say about this. Do feel free to link to your own blog posts about the discovery in the comments.
A rectangular region "the size of Wales"(which is the official journalistic unit of area) has been found over 600 miles off the coast of west Africa:
My first thought was that there are a few engineers at Google having a laugh, and that this is a bit of an "easter egg". But looking at the rectangles, if it is meant to look like Atlantis it's pretty shite! It's also way too big. Wales has an area of 20,779km2. The heaving metropolis that is the Geater Los Angeles Area is 12,562km2. Is Atlantis really meant to be twice the size of Greater Los Angeles at a time when the population of the entire Earth can't have been much greater than the population of LA?
The scale is all out too. If we approximate the rectangle as 160km by 130km, then many of those "city blocks" are in excess of 10km wide. The "roads" must be 500m or wider. Now, in theory, the residents of Atlantis could have enjoyed nice wide avenues, but I think 500m is taking the piss a bit, don't you?
So if it isn't Atlantis, what is it then? This is when I wish I'd been listening more in my Geological Sciences B lectures instead of wishing I didn't have 9am lectures on a Saturday morning. Igneous rocks can form spectacular cracks and joints. Giant's Causeway is a wonderful example of hexagonal columnar jointing. But can we get jointing on such a large 10km scale or more? I'm looking forward to seeing what my more hard-rock geobloggers have to say about this. Do feel free to link to your own blog posts about the discovery in the comments.
They are sonar tracks. High-res data overlaid on a low-res background. It is not a feature of the seabed, just different sensor stripes.
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