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Google Denies It's Atlantis

By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff

Posted Feb 21, 2009 8:19 PM CST

(Newser) – Google has rebuffed a claim that Google Earth 5.0 helped uncover the lost city of Atlantis, vnunet reports. The undersea lines spotted by an engineer are not streets, a Google spokesperson said, but traces of boats gathering data with sonar technology. Google Earth has aided in other "amazing discoveries," however, including an ancient villa and "a pristine forest in Mozambique."

Tiffany Wardman, of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, watches a demonstration of the new Google Earth 5.0 in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009.
Tiffany Wardman, of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, watches a demonstration of the new Google Earth 5.0 in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009.   (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
A British aeronautical engineer using Google Ocean said that a grid of lines he spotted off the Canary Islands may be the fabled city of Atlantis.
A British aeronautical engineer using Google Ocean said that a grid of lines he spotted off the Canary Islands may be the fabled city of Atlantis.   (Google)
Sylvia Earle of the National Geographic Society cheers at the image shown on the new Google Earth 5.0 in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009.
Sylvia Earle of the National Geographic Society cheers at the image shown on the new Google Earth 5.0 in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009.   (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 4 comments
riffran
Feb 23, 2009 1:21 AM CST
active sonar displays a very limited cross section of the target per pulse....and they get processed into a colage of sorts to give the big picture perspective and a bit of a 3 dimensional aspect......now if the data was recorded improperly and or not properly added to the data base....maybe so....but to me it sure does seem awfully delineated and isolated to be just a sound induced grid work...I don't buy it either.....as for coverage of area......a sonar pulse is kind of like a CT scan in operation...it takes "slices" of the bottom topography so many times a second or minute, as they pilot over the target zone
Thinker
Feb 22, 2009 6:43 AM CST
And, why wouldn't these types of boats leave these types of grids all over the ocean, not just in this one spot?
Thinker
Feb 22, 2009 6:38 AM CST
I don't know anything about sonar, but the last article said that that area of grid lines was the size of a small country (Wales?). Does sonar cover that much space, that concentrated?

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