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GlobalXplorer has been launched:
A website that will let members of the public search for potential archaeological sites has been launched. It is the brainchild of space archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak who set it up using prize money from the Ted conference. Describing it as "Indiana Jones meets Google Earth", she said the site would also allow the public to help prevent looting. [...] Using the [satellite imagery algorithm] technique, which is used by a growing number of researchers, she has discovered 17 potential pyramids, 3,000 settlements and 1,000 lost tombs in Egypt.
[...] [To] make sure looters do not use the site to locate potential targets, the high-resolution satellite images are broken into tens of million of small tiles which are displayed to users in a random order without the ability to navigate or pan out. The tiles do not contain any location reference or co-ordinate information.
Users are rewarded for their time with content about Peru, behind-the-scenes looks at archaeological sites and the opportunity to join archaeologists on digs. DigitalGlobe, a satellite imagery company, is providing more than 200,000 sq km of satellite imagery of Peru for users to peruse. There are plans to launch the site in other countries later this year.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @09:32PM
I saw an interesting NOVA (or some similar show) about her looking for North American viking settlements. She takes different wavelength satellite images and does some math on them and you end up with an image that looks like you pushed it through an edge detection algorithm. She studies those images to look for non-natural shapes, such as circles, rectangles, etc., that you'd see from the foundations of walls and buildings. Actually verifying these sites is, or can be, very time consuming. To say she "discovered" 4000+ sites is hyperbolic, unless the word "potential" is to be applied to all 4000+ of them. It sounds very impressive, but if her success rate is, say, 1/1000, then maybe not as impressive.