New Nazca Lines Discovered!

by Campbell Starr, Athena’s Student

Have you ever flown in an airplane and looked out the window at the land below? It is really cool because you can see so many things from a different perspective. From an airplane I have already seen houses, rivers, and all sorts of things, but I really want to fly over Peru to see the Nazca lines.

I have wanted to do this ever since I took Dr. Kirsten’s Story of the World class at Athena’s where we learned about the Nazca lines. She explained that these geoglyphs were huge drawings on the earth created a very long time ago, some in the B.C.E. era! Some of the shapes the people created are over hundreds of meters long and can be best seen from the air, which is why I want to see them from an airplane!

As Dr. Kirsten said, we do not know everything there is to know about these lines and researchers are still working to uncover the meaning behind the Nazca lines. Scientists are still working on learning more about the lines and have used artificial intelligence (AI) to help to solve some of the mysteries. In doing so, researchers recently discovered 143 new Nazca line geoglyphs in Peru.

Photo Credit: Yamagata University, IBM Japan

In addition to all of the other geoglyphs that the researchers already knew about, they found some geoglyphs that look like humans, some that look like animals, and some that look like scenes. The scenes resemble ones you would usually see in Mayan artwork. My favorite is the “person” pictured in these two pictures. It was discovered using only AI!

Here you can see what the geoglyph looks like from the air and then how AI depicts it. It’s really cool how people can get a better picture of what the Nazca lines used to look like long ago by using AI.

My hope is to go to see the Nazca lines as soon as I can. I am looking forward to seeing all of the images from the air and then look at one from the ground. Until then, I will be looking on the Internet for more information on them!

Photo Credit: Yamagata University, IBM Japan