Google Earth Discovery?

[King of the Americas]

Ever heard of the Nazca Lines, of Peru?

They were made years ago by a native people, for some reason or another...

You can't really see all of them using Google Earth, but some of the longer straighter ones, stick out of the desert sands, and are easily seen using the free downloadable version of the software.

What are these lines?

17 degrees 53'11.66 S
70 degrees 37'43.27 W

Irrigation, maybe?


Pull out and away until you can clearly make out the flat desert plains between the Andes Mountains and the South American West coast.

There are strange lines laid out across the entire desert...

Some even in perfect checker board style.

Any thoughts?

[King of the Americas]

& these:

16 degrees 41'10.35" S
71 degrees 53'37.40" W

[JC Fla]

Advertisements...like billboards for alien spacecraft. Yep. Thats it.

[Solitaire]

38°42'16.36"N 9°24'17.26"W 250 Meters
I dare you to drive this road.

[King of the Americas]

Sarcasm is unappreciated.

Seriously.

What are or were these?

Irrigation ditches?

[sinclairmcevoy]

I believe I read or saw somewhere that it is believed that hot air balloons were used in the distant past. The lines may have been navigational tools.

[Apathia]

I can't find these coordinates, Google Earth keeps giving me a "Your search returned no results."

[Ex-drone]

Just pictographs. See SkepticWiki.

[slyjoe]

Hyparxis:

Google Earth is picky about how you enter lat lon. Separate the deg min sec with a space, in the following format, and Latitude has to be first, followed by a comma.

dd mm ss.ss N, dd mm ss.ss W

Dont' know if this was the problem, but doing the above worked for me.

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

Sarcasm is unappreciated.

Not by all.

Quote:

Seriously.

If you insist.

Quote:

What are or were these?

We can only guess. Mine is that they are religious. Someone had a vision of some sort and the next thing you knew there was a whole society dedicated to a massive amount of useless exercise. Think Stonehenge. Think the pyramids. Think Easter Island.

As for the visibility from the air, check out "Serpent Mounds" on Google. You could also check the entire topic of the Nazca Lines on Google. There is a lot of information there.

Quote:

Irrigation ditches?

Since they were made by just moving and turning over rocks, they are certainly not irrigation ditches.

[humingbrd]

The book "1491" has an excellent discussion of the Nazca lines. Big public works projects.

[Solitaire]

17°53'11.66"S, 70°37'43.27"W, 5 km
Survey lines etched and forgotten.
Looks like someone discovered drip irrigation farming.

17°53'11.66"S, 70°37'43.27"W, 2.00 km
Farm fields, tract housing, and a burning rubbish pile.

17°54'12.04"S, 70°38'4.13"W, 500 meters
A happy face!

17°54'35.69"S, 70°38'17.16"W, 1.00 km
Four leaf clover.

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

& these:

16 degrees 41'10.35" S
71 degrees 53'37.40" W

I think this one is a road. Either modern or ancient. The gradient is not very large.

[King of the Americas]

The images I am talking about are NOT "Nazca Lines". These images are located further south than Nazca. I found them simply by looking at other geography, similiar to that of the Nazca Flat, on South America.

Between the coast and the mountain range, there is an area along the west coast that has the same kind of desert flat region.

The 'lines' that I am looking at look like grade paper. They are just lines formed into grades, no pictures or animals.

Some of the lines are over 10 miles long, while most are shorter.

It looks to 'me' like an old irrigation system of some kind, where the lines aren't dug 'into the desert', but rather are wals that could hold in water to flood the fields as in rice farming...?

That is just a guess, given that areas nearer cities seem to have 'green' fields shaped and laid out in a similiar fashion.

[King of the Americas]

17 degrees 35'11.46 S
70 degrees 51'43.98 W

This looks like one of the irrigation farms still in operation, and what looks like a damed lake further north...?

If these ARE irrigation ditches, they could be some of the largest the world has known. These things go on, literally for miles and miles.

---

On the northern part of the 'checkerbaord', it looks like there was a meteor strike

16 degrees 40'21.37" S
71 degrees 55'33.04" W

Notice the light blue , cresent moon shaped pock marks atop the otherwise sandy colored desert.

[King of the Americas]

So, are these pock marks meteor strikes? If so, can they be dated to reveal the minimal age of the lines???

[Beady]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

So, are these pock marks meteor strikes? If so, can they be dated to reveal the minimal age of the lines???

If they can, I'm sure the possibility has not gone unnoticed until now.

[King of the Americas]

HAVE these formations been noticed before, if so what explaination was given?

E.T.A. The largest pock mark is over 230 feet across.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by sinclairmcevoy

I believe I read or saw somewhere that it is believed that hot air balloons were used in the distant past. The lines may have been navigational tools.

Don't confuse an unsupported hypothesis with "believed" even if someone else does believe it. In other words the better way for a skeptic to convey this information would either be to say someone has hypothesized or someone has suggested or (more specifically than "it is believed" which implies widespread acceptance) someone believes.

We don't want to share in the woo rumor mill.

[King of the Americas]

NO WOO HERE...

I have not envoked UFO's, Aliens, Big Bird, or God.

Although, I think IF meteors DID hit here, then the entire area would have felt the impact.

Maybe that's why there are no more farms here...

[fishbob]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

So, are these pock marks meteor strikes? If so, can they be dated to reveal the minimal age of the lines???

Not meteor strikes at all. Those are dunes - textbook examples.

Barchan Dunes

[King of the Americas]

Well, that's the forth opinion I have had on these 'marks'.

And indeed, that's what the othe 3 opinions stated

---

So much for dating the lines...

[Topspy]

Originally Posted by Beady

If they can, I'm sure the possibility has not gone unnoticed until now.

stranger things have happened.....

[King of the Americas]

Does anyone here know someone IN Peru???

I'd love to know about the topography within these lines...

On the Nazca Flat, the lines were made simply by moving the darker colored surface stones, to reveal the lighter color desert floor.

If these ARE drip irrigation ditches/gardens, then they would need walls, not a ditch surrounding the garden, no?

Admittedly, unexplained stuff interests me greatly.

[Cuddles]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

Any thoughts?

Ancient crop circles. Only they didn't have TV in those days so they had more time to spend making them. And they hadn't invented circles yet.

[King of the Americas]

Any 'serious' thoughts?

[UnrepentantSinner]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

What are these lines?

17 degrees 53'11.66 S
70 degrees 37'43.27 W

Irrigation, maybe?

Why don't you figure out what the buildings around
17 52' 01.05" S
70 34' 19.17" W
are and then what that nearby city is and you might be on your way towards figuring out.

[screensnot]

The least you could do is post your coordinates in a format that people can copy/paste into GE. The default setting in GE needs dd mm ss.ss x, dd mm ss.ss x (in parenthesis is the optional decimal setting - you can change to it in Tools -> Options).

Your first location: 17 53 11.66 S, 70 37 43.27 W (-17.886572, -70.628685)

Your second location: Bah, do it yourself; it's your post.

[cloudshipsrule]

Looks like copper mining. The mining industry is big in this area, and the holes are test mines/actual mines. You can find other mines more symetrically placed by scanning the landscape with Google Earth. This is just a guess.

Here's a gif that might be useful:

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pu...maps/95199.gif

and another image:

http://www.xstrata.com/img/tintaya.jpg

[King of the Americas]

No...copper mines are quite different.

Have any of you 'looked' along the area I am describing?

There is a long thin, 'flat' desert area long the western coast of South America.

The "Nasca Lines" are just we well known, northern pictographs. The 'lines' or 'grids' I am talking about are further south.

There are other 'lines' even further south.

How does Google Earth go about imaging the ocean floor?

I was looking at the ocean floor to the south west of Bermuda, and found some interestingly intersecting lines.

[ben m]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

No...copper mines are quite different.

Have any of you 'looked' along the area I am describing?

The first step in copper mining is not to dig a giant hole in the ground. The first step is to map the geology from the surface (thumper trucks, gravity and magnetic mapping). The second step is to set up a grid of core samples and make a 3D map of the possible deposit.

Seriously, your "grid" looks like it corresponds very closely to this mining claim. You might be looking at a grid of boreholes mapping out an ore deposit.

[King of the Americas]

...these 'lines' run the 'entire' length of the continent, that 'grid' is but a small portion of one kind of these lines.

Take a look for yourself...

Start at Nasca, and work your way south.

[I Ratant]

Looks like a colony of Elbonians whose original country of mud was packaged and sold, and they've just continued the hallowed tradition in Peru.. according to Dilbert.

[ben m]

Sorry, I'm seeing:

a) a striking grid, not quite irrigation-looking, in a well-contained grid, and
b) a bunch of old unpaved roads.
c) one nice paved road with power lines (electrical power, not "Qi") running alongside.

The longer lines I saw are very obviously old jeep trails or whatever. One of them, for example, leads to -17.837 S -70.7919 W which is clearly a road intersection. One of them heads straight for a dry wash and becomes an obvious mountain road, including roadcuts like -17.9979° -70.8616° (follow that road northeast). One of the longer ones simply follows some power lines---you can see a tower at -17.9946° -70.3214° (follow that line north and you're in your grid area.)

If there's supposed to be some interesting "signal" among these lines, there's also an awful lot of noise.

[Ixion]

Personally I have always thought the Nazca region was simply pictographs and that lines around it were just pictographs that never were completed or were reference lines.

A region that intrigues me a little more in Peru is the Pisco highway. Google Earth 13 degrees 46' 57.56" S, 76 degrees 02' 49.92' W
This road goes for many miles through the desert and has 1-2 m holes spaced evenly along it. I am sure the holes are man-made, but for what purpose? At the terminal end of the road is a grid of holes (see 13 46 16.00 S, 76 09 04.15 W). Maybe some failed public works project?

Also concerning another interesting region:
I live in Tucson, AZ with my wife, but we are originally are from Texas, so we fly back to visit parents a few times a year. Every time we fly the flight pattern takes us over El Paso and west Texas, and I am always amazed at this region: 31 40 56.22 W, 106 05 32.64 W
There is a small town nearby (Aqua Dulce), but these empty subdivision layouts stretch for miles. You don't really get a good appreciation for it from Google Earth due to the fact that some of these regions go into low resolution areas, but in the airplane you can see the immensity of it. Roads formed for Cul-de-Sacs, and crisscrossing for miles, but no buildings of any kind. I wondered why anyone would go through the trouble to map these out, since they are miles from anything.

Finally, some food for thought:
If you go to 48 49 30.80 N, 2 11 54.96 E, you will arrive at a location in France. You will see a military style jet parked in a parking lot. On some Google Earth websites, this is described as being a school building. Perhaps an inspiration for the X-Men movies?

[Dancing David]

The first looks like a road to me and the second farms
third looks like hedge rows, pature and some terraced fields

more fields and dunes for sure


try for comparison

18 51 16.76 N, 99 02 18.13 W

You will see the difference between wet and dry as well as the large barren area with a road and what might be transmission lines maybe a cement yard, Popocatepetal is close too

[I Ratant]

It's a Mirage fighter. Probably a training aid at a technical high school?
Out west....
39 08.25' 04N, 121 25.50' 93 W... Dragon Ladies...
An earlier version of G. Earth caught one taking off.
G. Earth has a lot of these which change with the updating of the imagery.

[CapelDodger]

Originally Posted by ben m

The first step in copper mining is not to dig a giant hole in the ground.

It certainly wasn't in the Nazca days. The first step was finding ore at the surface, and the next was following the vein wherever it went.

[robinson]

There are several Google Earth forums. I suggest asking about this on one of them. There is a huge list of stuff like this.

[Complexity]

Originally Posted by King of the Americas

Sarcasm is unappreciated.

Then it is guaranteed to be repeated.

Seriously.