Thursday, March 13, 2008

Remote Sensing as used for archeological research

Remote Sensing as used for archeological research: "Now more than ever, archeological research is interdisciplinary: botany, forestry, soil science, hydrology - all of which contribute to a more complete understanding of the earth, climate shifts, and how people adapt to large regions.

As a species, we've been literally blind to the universe around us. If the known electromagnetic spectrum were scaled up to stretch around the Earth's circumference, the human eye would see a portion equal to the diameter of a pencil. Our ability to build detectors that see for us where we can't see, and computers that bring the invisible information back to our eyesight, will ultimately contribute to our survival on Earth and in space.

The spectrum of sunlight reflected by the Earth's surface contains information about the composition of the surface, and it may reveal traces of past human activities, such as agriculture. Since sand, cultivated soil, vegetation, and all kinds of rocks each have distinctive temperatures and emit heat at different rates, sensors can 'see' things beyond ordinary vision or cameras. Differences in soil texture are revealed by fractional temperature variations. So it is possible to identify loose soil that had been prehistoric agricultural fields, or was covering buried remains. The Maya causeway was detected through emissions of infrared radiation at a different wavelength from surr"
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