At the National Ocean Service, we occasionally receive excited emails from folks who, while ‘navigating’ the ocean floor in Google Earth, thought per chance they had ‘discovered’ the lost city of Atlantis. Alas, while the strange grid-like patterns they found were in fact created by humans, the patterns were only made of data. In other words, there are no physical lines on the ocean floor. These lines are artifacts of the ocean floor mapping process.

Thanks to a recent update to ocean data in the Google Earth application, those grid lines are now gone and the city of Atlantis is, once again, lost.

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