Google Earth Ocean Floor Update Ends Atlantis Rumors

Google Earth is a great tool for exploring the Earth. It's even a great tool for discovering and exploring new archaeological sites. But it does have its limits and sometime, would-be explorers stumble upon things that look like Atlantis, but are really data artifacts created by Google's method of stitching together different data sources to create ocean terrain.

Some time ago, one very interesting pattern was spotted on the sea floor off the West Coast of Africa. The straight lines and right angles pointed at something man made, the lost city of Atlantis perhaps.

Google argued at the time that it was simply an error created by the way sonar ships sweep the ocean's floor to create a three-dimensional picture. But there were still naysaywers.

The latest ocean floor data, in the huge Google Earth update of last week provides a much more detailed view of the area and the pattern is much less visible.