On Google Earth, it looked like a small town on the ocean floor, with a familiar grid-like pattern of a town with streets and roads -- and it caused a lot of speculation that the isolated area might be the mythical city of Atlantis.
But now, Google has updated its ocean floor maps and done away with the grid, which was caused by overlapping sets of data and not a lost city, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told LiveScience. Instead, the map was created in 2009 using a prototype technology, an NOAA representative said. Since then, they have corrected several "blunders," including that when Google used the surveys together it could overlap and create grid patterns.
When the grid was first found in 2009, it caused a controversy with some believing it was proof that the lost city of Atlantis was real.
However, now apparently it was all just a mistake.
"The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data," David Sandwell, a Scripps geophysicist, said in a statement. "UCSD undergraduate students spent the past three years identifying and correcting the blunders."
For those who are sad about the loss, there's still the U.S. Navy's seemingly homage to Hitler in the shape of a swastika.
