Geoglyphs are the rocky cousins of crop circles. Ancient civilizations drew large pictures--some of them a half-mile wide--on the ground by stacking rocks, or removing them to expose lighter-colored soil beneath, in order to create lines.
The best-known geoglyphs in the world are probably those at Nazca, Peru. Hundreds have been discovered to date, and the number recently received a boost. Archaeologists from Japan's Yamagata University, who have been studying Nazca since 2004, have just announced that they've discovered 143 previously unseen geoglyphs--all thought to be about 2,000 years old--through a combination of fieldwork and the analysis of 3D geographic data.
Below are the images, both unprocessed and processed. As these new finds have not yet been named, I'll offer my suggestions for what each should be called:
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Processed
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Interestingly enough, the research team would have only discovered 142 new geoglyphs, if they hadn't had some help from IBM's Watson Machine Learning AI. The AI pitched in to analyze the data and found this image:
If you'd like to read the technical details of how the work was performed, Yamagata U.'s press release is here.
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Nice work on turning an interesting news into insignificance