![]() "The world continues to battle the devastating effects of drought today, from the arid plains of Africa to the southern United States," he said. Scientists believe the Maya fell prey to a number of cataclysmic environmental problems, including deforestation and drought, that led to their downfall, Irwin said. "They help us prepare for our own future." "Studies such as these do more than fulfill our curiosity about the past," Sever said. The team will verify their research and continue refining their remote sensing tools to more easily lead explorers to other ancient ruins and conduct Earth science research in the region. Under a NASA Space Act Agreement with the University of New Hampshire, the science team will visit Guatemala annually through 2009, with the support of the Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History and the Department of Pre-Hispanic Monuments. "This pattern of small details, impossible to see from the forest floor or low-altitude planes, turned out to be a virtual roadmap to ancient Maya sites when seen from space." "Over the centuries, the changes became dramatic," Saturno said. As these structures crumbled, the lack of moisture and nutritional elements inside the ruins kept some plant species at bay, while others were discolored or killed off altogether as disintegrating plaster changed the chemical content of the soil around each structure. The Maya built their cities and towns with excavated limestone and lime plasters. The cause of the floral discoloration discerned in the imagery quickly became clear to the team. ![]() ![]() William Saturno of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, explore a trench below an ancient Maya pyramid in Guatemala. Image at right: NASA scientist Daniel Irwin, left, and archaeologist Dr. Integrating cutting-edge remote sensing technology as a vital research tool enabled the scientists to expand their study of the jungle. Hiking deep into the jungle to locations guided by the satellite images, they uncovered a series of Maya settlements exactly where the technology had predicted they would be found. In 2004, the team ground-tested the data. They discovered a correlation between the color and reflectivity of the vegetation seen in the images - their "signature," which is captured by instruments measuring light in the visible and near-infrared spectrums - and the location of known archaeological sites. These resulting Earth observations have helped the team survey an uncharted region around San Bartolo, Guatemala. He and Irwin provided Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA's Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument flown aboard a high-altitude weather plane, capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies. Sever has explored the capacity of remote sensing technology and the science of collecting information about the Earth's surface using aerial or space-based photography to serve archeology. Explorers can stumble right through an ancient city that once housed thousands - and never even realize it." "On the ground, the 60- to 100-foot trees and dense undergrowth can obscure objects as close as 10 feet away. "From the air, everything but the tops of very few surviving pyramids are hidden by the tree canopy," said Sever, widely recognized for two decades as a pioneer in the use of aerospace remote-sensing for archaeology. The yellowish areas, which denote discolorations of the dense forest canopy, also pinpoint ancient Maya building sites. Image at right: A high-resolution, false-color image taken by the commercial Earth-observation satellite IKONOS shows a Guatemalan "bajo," or a broad, lowland area that is often partially submerged during the rainy season. NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin, both from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are teaming with William Saturno, an archaeologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, to locate the ruins of the ancient culture. ![]() Now, NASA and university scientists are using space- and aircraft-based "remote-sensing" technology to uncover those ruins, using the chemical signature of the civilization's ancient building materials. ![]() Remains of the ancient Maya culture, mysteriously destroyed at the height of its reign in the ninth century, have been hidden in the rainforests of Central America for more than 1,000 years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |