The circular shape on the seabed that appears on Google Earth provokes the curiosity of netizens. Many thought it was a trail of aliens and UFOs. Is it true?
The sighting image was shared by Scott Waring, owner of the UFOsightingsdaily.com site. He frequently encounters objects or sightings that he claims are "100% proof of the existence of ancient aliens".
Quoted from Live Science, Waring diligently researches photos from NASA rover, and he claims to have found everything from monkeys on Mars to the body of a 7.3-meter-tall Martian king who was killed in battle 1 million years ago.
So, what Waring found this time was really alien? The circle is about 6.8 kilometers in diameter and is visible about 566 km off the coast of Lima, Peru. The circle appears to rise from the seabed like a hill or mountain.
However, most likely, this seabed core is a data artifact. The strange shape can appear for various reasons on the seabed as recorded on Google Earth.
To note, Google uses data from various sources to map the sea floor. These sources have different resolutions, or levels of detail, and when combined, sometimes appear odd shapes.
In a 2016 blog post, a developer at Google pointed out one quirk of the data that can lead to the odd appearance of hill and valley artifacts. The seabed background map is based on a map created by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography that uses gravity measurements from satellites to roughly map ocean floor tides (also known as ocean bathymetry).
For more detailed mapping, Google also obtained data from ship-based sonar surveys. This sonar survey sends sound vibrations to the ocean floor, then records the echo to obtain high-resolution images.
Sometimes, satellite-based rough measurements and ship measurements don't match, and one data point from one or the other can lead to what appears to be a steep hill or slope.
Well, the "alien" that Waring found was right in the middle of the transect line where the ship's sonar survey had clearly passed, thus allowing the shape to be a side effect of bringing together multiple data sources. These long lines are visible across the ocean floor in Google Earth, and are sometimes mistaken for signs of a lost civilization.
On the other hand, the odd shape of the ocean floor in Google Earth illustrates how little we know about the ocean floor. Satellite imagery covering almost the entire ocean floor can resolve seafloor features up to about 1.5 km away, while modern seafloor sonar can reveal detail at depths of 100 m. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), only 5% of the ocean floor has been mapped by modern sonar.