China’s Area 51 on Google Earth?
Who thought that anything could be keep seceret when viewed from a satellite. Just take a look at what one man found searching the depeths of Google Earth satellite maps.
If you’re a Google Earth geek, these oddities are old news, shared long ago on countless forums throughout the Web.
They are, so to speak, for amateurs.
But every evening, once the kids have gone to bed, the pros hit the circuit. They trawl through images of foreign lands, trying to find the screen shot that will launch them to blogosphere stardom.
And sometimes, albeit very rarely, they stumble on something big.
Last month, while scrutinizing landscapes in China, German Googler “KenGrok” discovered what appeared to be a terrain model on a Chinese military base. And it was not just any terrain.
What’s interesting here is that this image may never have been found without the help of Google Maps. The ability for everyday people to trawl the vast set of satellite images will lead to more and more *discoveries* like this in the future.
According to Noah Shachtman, editor of Defense Tech, the most important lesson to be taken from this discovery is how geo-spacial information is changing the way that people look at the world.
“Average folks are finding really surprising things on Google Earth because it’s accessible to the average Web surfer,” Shachtman said. “It’s closer to curiosity than military advantage.”
