TMCnet Feature

All that is old is new again, and what once was found is lost again. Google (News - Alert) Earth has updated its oceans app and in the process, the Lost City of Atlantis is once again lost. Google Maps has long prided itself on being the world's foremost authority on finding almost anything and with each new upgrade and update. Google Earth has long held the mantle of being the most trusted mapping software, not just because it allows you to find your way from point A to point B, but because it allows you to find your way around so many different environments. 

Google Earth has spanned across the globe and has managed to even map out the inside of some of America's biggest malls. Of course, Google Earth's oceans application was interesting because the software that is used to map out the planet's last unexplored frontier was showing up a patch of land that many were claiming (facetiously we hope) was Atlantis. For its part, Google has claimed since Google Oceans was launched in 2009, that the raised lines in the grid were actually simply bad bits of data. Of course, once a legend like this gets started, it is hard to squash it down.

The search giant is hoping that the latest update, which does not include these raised lines, will work towards tempering anyone's enthusiasm. Before any conspiracy theorists get up in arms, Google has also noted that this new update gets rid of quite a bit of other mistakes in the mapping software. Google released an official statement detailing the fixes that were employed with this new update. 

“The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data,” Scripps Geophysicist David Sandwell, said. “UCSD undergraduate students spent the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders.”

Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, the National Oceanic (News - Alert) and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and several other oceanic organizations worked together to put together this new update for Google Oceans. Google says that there will be another major update later this year that will make the service even more accurate.