Is That Atlantis? No, It’s Not, Says Google

By Digital Trends Staff February 24, 2009

Is That Atlantis? No, It

For centuries people have hunted the lost, and probably mythical, city of Atlantis, which was located…well, somewhere. It supposedly vanished around 9000 BC, "in a single day and night of misfortune" according to the philosopher Plato.

At the start of this week, however, British tabloid newspaper The Sun said that aeronautical engineer Bernie Bamford had spotted a suspiciously square grid of lines in the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa, using Google Earth.

Was this, the newspaper wondered, the lost city of Atlantis?

No, Google responded, it wasn’t. Instead the grids were marks made by boats using sonar technology to collect data from the ocean floor.

A Google spokesperson said:

"Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data."

Editors' Recommendations

Digital Trends Staff

Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…

News

Walk the Great Wall of China in Google’s latest virtual tour

The Great Wall of China.

If your pandemic-related precautions still prevent you from traveling but you’d like to take a trip somewhere far away, then how about diving into the latest virtual tour from Google Arts & Culture?

The Street View-style experience features a 360-degree virtual tour of one of the best-preserved sections of the Great Wall, which in its entirety stretches for more than 13,000 miles -- about the round-trip distance between Los Angeles and New Zealand.

Smart Home

Sustainable with Google 2021: Nest Renew, traffic light efficiency, and more

Photo of a woman adjusting a Nest Thermostat.

During its Sustainable with Google event on Tuesday, the company announced a range of improvements across its product portfolio that are aimed at helping users make more sustainable decisions. Updates and projects aim to lower carbon emissions by steering people toward more environmentally friendly travel choices, greener products, and more accurate information around climate change.

Besides consumer products, Google took the opportunity at the event to toot its own horn about a previous commitment to having net-zero data centers by 2030. The company says it is leveraging the "cleanest cloud in the industry" for partners like Whirlpool, Etsy, HSBC, Unilever, and Salesforce. More news on that front is expected next week at its annual cloud conference. Here's everything announced at Sustainable with Google 2021.
Nest offers carbon offsets

Mobile

Twitter is facing its own outages as Facebook users flock to other sites

When Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, the groundswell of people rushing to other platforms to continue their social posting and messaging -- likely to poke fun at Facebook, frankly -- was intense. So much so, it seems, that Twitter is also experiencing problems.

Everyone's favorite doomsday watchlist Downdetector shows many reports of issues with Twitter, and staff members here at Digital Trends are seeing intermittent problems loading tweets -- both on the timeline and from individual links. So far the issue doesn't seem universal, and content usually loads after a handful of page refreshes, so we can hope this is a little blip and not the start of a larger problem.