Used to think aerial photos were just fancy pictures, but a LiDAR scan from Guatemala changed my mind completely

I always figured those drone shots of ruins were mostly for social media, not real science. Then my professor showed me a LiDAR dataset from Tikal that revealed a whole network of canals under the jungle canopy. It took about 2 hours of poking around the layers to see how much ground-level surveys had missed. Now I check satellite imagery before I even plan a field trip. Anyone else get converted by a specific tech tool or dataset?

3 comments

3 Comments

milaw141mo ago

The 2016 LiDAR survey at Tikal was the one that got me. I remember sitting in a lecture hall watching the data render and seeing these massive earthworks that nobody had walked over in centuries. It made me go back and look at old aerial photos from the 1970s and realize those faint lines in the shadows were all there, we just didn't have the eyes to see them. Now I can't stop pulling up satellite imagery for every site I visit, just to see what might be hiding under the trees. It's like having x-ray vision for the ground.

mila_campbell251mo ago

@milaw14 that "faint lines in the shadows" part really hit me hard. I've been doing the same thing with old aerial photos of my hometown in Ohio, and last week I found this PERFECT ring of darker soil in a field near the creek. You're totally right about the x-ray vision thing, it's like a whole new layer of the world just got turned ON. I literally pulled up the county GIS maps after that and found an old 1800s plat showing a structure right in that spot. Now every field I drive past looks like a giant puzzle I can't stop trying to solve.

burns.jenny1mo ago

Wait, did you also spend an embarrassing amount of time zooming in on that 2016 Tikal data looking for, like, a lost Starbucks or something? (I totally did.) My own 'eureka' moment was with a simple drone and a cheap multispectral camera over a cornfield in Indiana - found what looked like a circular ditch from an old settlement, just because the plants grew weird over the soil. It's definitely ruined regular maps for me, now I get disappointed when a LiDAR scan doesn't reveal a secret city under my neighborhood park.