More than 100 new designs discovered in Peru’s ancient Nazca plain (opens in new tab)

Yikes.

They needed to beat the travesty at Stonehenge. https://www.highwaysindustry.com/turner-townsend-wins-work-k...

Are you able to pinpoint it on google maps or some such? That image looks more like a render to me than a photograph.

It's not really a mystery. The geoglyphs are visible from surrounding hills and other vantage points on the ground. They're essentially just giant works of art.

From the fossils or artifacts of that time, the value will be estimated but even the estimated value shows just how big human history is.

The article explains. They are using drone footage and AI to recognize likely patterns.

These geoglyphs (they think) are older than the classic Nazca lines as some of the designs are similar to people who were around before the Nazca people, around 200BC I believe, and the Nazca are somewhere in the 1000-1500 AD range. They are also on hillsides instead of on the plains, so they are susceptible to natural erosion. That's why they're using the AI to suss out likely designs from the "damaged" areas.

I'm not sure about this specific case but generally commercial wide coverage satellite imagery is not high quality enough to reliably see these kinds of formations. I'd guess they contract some combination of imaging including LIDAR to get better images to work from. That lets you see through vegetation etc. Here's an example from Tikal:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lidar-reveals-oldest-big...

Greenpeace is an anti-science group that does harm to what they claim is their cause. This sort of thing doesn't surprise me.