A Google Ground function that lifted rumors of the lost metropolis of Atlantis has gotten a much-needed update, ridding the seafloor of a gridlike figure that some vigilant users suspected were sunken streets from the mythological underwater city.

In fact, Google Ocean, an extension of function program Google Earth, was only displaying a data artifact from the sonar method that oceanographers usage to mapping the seafloor. This week, Google updated the application with new seafloor data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other groups.

“The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype mapping that received high resolution only likewise contained chiliads of blunders related to the original archived ship data,” David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist, pronounced in a statement. “UCSD undergraduate students expended the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders.”

The bookmen besides incorporated new data into the archive that Google uses to produce its function888 of underwater topography. Researchers create this data by utilizing sonar, or levelheaded waves, that bounce away the seafloor and return info about its shape, not unlike how a bat uses sonar to “see” bugs. When Google uses lots of these surveys together, they sometimes overlap, making foreign gridlike patterns.

That’s what haped in 2009, shortly later the launch of the extension. Eagle-eyed Google Ocean explorers spotted a big grid on the seafloor that looked strikingly like the streets of a well-organized small town. Immediately, “Atlantis” rumors got flying. [Fact or Fantasy? 20 Imaginary Worlds]

In fact, the grid was but caused by overlapping datasets, allotting to NOAA. Also that, the grid that looked alike a little town really covered an expanse of sea more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) panoptic — not precisely small-town proportions.

The updated Google Ocean has been scrubbed of this Atlantis artifact. Google Ocean is too becoming increasingly accurate in other ways. The program forthwith has 15 pct of its seafloor icon postulated from shipboard soundings at a 0.6-mile (1 km) resolution. Former versions took exclusively 10 pct of seafloor imaging from sonar soundings and the residuum from extrapolations by scientists using satellite data.

Even those estimates will presently exist stronger: The future major upgrade is planned for afterward this year, and will exercise a new calculation technique that returns depth predictions that are doubly equally accurate as before.