![]() Their ringleader was documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp, accompanied by his wife Kay, a federal probation officer. There was George Hedges, an entertainment industry lawyer from Los Angeles Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a British baronet and explorer and Juris Zarins, an archaeologist. This was a reconnaissance mission, their first to the desert of Oman. The group was on a quest to find the ruins of an ancient, remote outpost-a destination that would have taken days to reach by camel. Their transport, a Vietnam War-era Huey helicopter, had returned to Thumrait Air Base to refuel, leaving them grounded until morning. They had not planned on stopping here for the night, so they had no radio, nor any mode of communication. The small group spread out their sleeping bags on a desert mesa, under the setting Sun. Story by Pola Lem.It was the summer of 1990 and broiling hot in southwest Oman. Geological Survey, and SAR imagery courtesy of NASA JPL. NASA Earth Observatory images and illustration by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Read more about the search for Ubar and about the development of remote sensing tools in Peering through the Sands of Time. The shuttle radar imagers allowed researchers to see ancient trade routes and other interesting features buried within the Rub’ al-Khali, or “Empty Quarter.” In ancient times, some of this land may have been green and vegetated, resembling a savanna. Unlike optical instruments, which can only see the surface, radar can penetrate some materials such as sand. The smoothness, roughness, and density of a surface all affect what the instrument can “see” in the return signal. Radar imagers send out pulses of radio waves and collect the return signals (like echoes) after the waves bounce off of surfaces on the land and sea. So they asked NASA to collect some images of the Arabian Peninsula in areas cited by historical texts. They had read about how Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists had discovered unprecedented underground details beneath the Selima sand sheet, a vast expanse of desert in Egypt. The city disappeared into the desert sands about 1500 years ago.Īn unlikely band of archaeology aficionados came to NASA in the 1980s and asked for help in finding the lost city. But according to legends, the people of the city behaved wickedly, provoking divine punishment. For several hundred years, Ubar grew wealthy as an outpost along frankincense trade routes. Such images once aided early pioneers of space archaeology as they searched for the lost oasis city of Ubar. Note how the radar image highlights features that do not necessarily stand out in color imagery. The second image was acquired by the Thematic Mapper on the Landsat 5 satellite. The top image comes from the Shuttle Imaging Radar-C (SIR-C) instrument that was flown on the space shuttle. The pair of images above show a desert region of Oman as it appeared from space in 1994. For many modern archaeologists, remote sensing tools have become as valuable as carbon dating. They can even search next to existing archaeological sites for evidence of other hidden structures. ![]() ![]() As satellite imaging-natural-color, false-color, and radar-evolved and became more accessible, a scientific community that had once measured the rise and fall of civilizations based on a few archaeological dig sites was suddenly turning up features hundreds or thousands of kilometers long.īy looking down from above, archaeologists can survey thousands of kilometers of a landscape from home and they can start to investigate potential dig sites without actually digging. They worked from historical accounts and biblical texts and a lot of educated guesswork.īut all of that changed in the late 20th century when some of them began using a new tool: remote sensing. Today’s story is drawn from our newest feature article: Peering through the Sands of Time: Searching for the Origins of Space Archaeology.įor centuries, if archaeologists wanted to find an ancient or mythical site, they trudged through desert sands or rainforest thickets armed with little more than rumors and hand-drawn maps.
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