Geometric trails under ocean?

[Naima]

Hi I was checking Google earth to see hows the oceanic surface done and I noticed all those straight lines....

1.jpg

are those mistakes or what how they got there in the map ?

[xpian]

I've heard that these are anomalies introduced by the way the sonar/radar surveys were done. This ships scan the ocean floor by moving in patterns, then all the data is correlated and assembled into a map. Sometimes a pattern emerges afterwards that is clearly non-natural, but it's just an artifact of the process.

This topic came up very prominently last year when eager watchers of Google maps claimed to have discovered the streets of ancient Atlantis on the ocean floor. Turns out, not so much.

[Hai-Etlik]

If you zoom in you can see that those are just regions of higher resolution, presumably the paths that were taken by survey ships where Google was able to get the resulting data. The rest has much lower resolution.