No, we haven't discovered Atlantis....

There's been some hype about Google Earth's new Ocean app, allowing users to dive under water and explore the ocean floor, learning about marine animals, research, and more. The hype hasn't all been about the app itself, though. Many users have been asking questions about strange patterns on the ocean floor picked up by the satellite images. Could this be the lost city of Atlantis?

It turns out that no, these strange patterns aren't the mark of an ancient city. The geometric shapes etched into the ocean floor are not streets, but rather marks made by ships using echosounding to map the ocean floor. (Read the full story on Google's official blog here.)

Even though no great discoveries were made, I find this story interesting. (And not just because I'm a fan of Google Earth and related products.) It reminds me a bit of the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlisted thousands of volunteers online to help classify galaxies. It turns out that with minimal training in what to look for, humans can identify galaxy types faster than the world's supercomputers. People got to help further research while having fun and looking at some pretty incredible images.

Google didn't create the Oceans app to get people to further marine research, but this "Atlantis discovery" still shows that it's pretty natural for people to want to explore the world and see what kinds of neat things are out there. Google put some new information and images out there, and people took to it, searching for new things and asking questions. Instead of research and discovery being limited to a lab, the information is made available online for the world to explore as well. This is a trend we seem to have been following for a while now. And it makes me wonder: What other sorts of things could the general public find that a small team of researchers - or computers - could miss?