4,000-year-old termite mounds found in Brazil are visible from space | Hacker News Reader

4,000-year-old termite mounds found in Brazil are visible from space

eurekalert.org

136 pointswglb38 comments

"The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth, are not nests."

This sentence from the article kindly submitted here ignores that Google Earth imagery includes imagery taken from airplanes as well as from satellites. Statements that such-and-such an object (a classic example is the Great Wall of China) is visible from space, or from the Moon, go back to eras long before human space flight. Most such statements are wrong.

As other comments previous to mine have noted, various specialized imaging devices in satellites (or on airplanes) can have a higher resolution than human-eye vision. But the headline "are visible from space" is surely an exaggeration. Space flight has been going on since 1960s, but there has been no report of the termite mounds till now, it appears.

Most things outdoors are visible from space with a high enough resolution/zoom camera. I’ve always thought the statement “viable from space” was closer to meaningless rather than exaggerated.

“Visible from space with the naked eye” would be more meaningful but rarely is that claim made.

In this case it’s more visible on google Maps, which was actually taken from space vs high resolution aerial photos.

It feels a bit disingenuous and clickbaity, like if an article said a bacteria was “visible to the human eye (with a microscope)”.

Agreed, it's a meaningless statement.

Considering the space shuttle's cargo bay was dimensioned to accomodate Hubble-sized spy satellites to be aimed at earth rather than the cosmos, practically everything on the surface of the planet is visible from space.

A video overview:

"... two hundred million of these mounds covering an area similar to the UK. This means that 10 km^3 (about 4000 great pyramids of Giza) of soil have been excavated, making this the greatest known example of ecosystem engineering by an insect..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXlS48mptbM

And the paper:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...

Geologist here. This reminds me of the previous story about massive paleoburrows (also in Brazil) that are thought to have been dug by extinct giant ground sloths [1,2].

The geological background for both of these stories seems to be that certain types of iron-rich soils ("cangas") found in South America have been found to erode extraordinarily slowly [3], in part because the iron oxides recrystallize to form a hard surface known as a duricrust [4]. This slow erosion combined with deep chemical weathering leads to old, thick soils that can hold a lot of ancient surprises.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18236249

[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/03/28/paleoburro...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X1...

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001670371...

> The amount of soil excavated is over 10 cubic kilometers, equivalent to 4,000 great pyramids of Giza ...

> he mounds are extremely old--up to 4,000 years

Soo they can build 1 Pyramid of Giza per year ? :D

Maybe faster. Their "building" capacity might have been growing with time.

I feel like this could be the prelude to a high school math question on exponential growth.

> Soo they can build 1 Pyramid of Giza per year ? :D

Depends if they unionize or not. (ducks)

"visible from space", still waiting from the picture from Space. I can smell the bullshit or the google map picture highly zoomed... but if they can zoom on your house they can zoom on those too, no need add this in the title.

here you go: https://www.google.be/maps/place/12%C2%B036'17.1%22S+40%C2%B...

edit: you can find the coordinates in the xlsx file they attached to the paper: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cub.2018.09.061/attachmen...

If you click on the post office of the closest town and look at the images, the town looks nice and clean, but there is literally not a human soul to be found. What's going on there? https://www.google.be/maps/place/Ubiraita/@-12.589317,-41.00...

Thanks, we barely see them, if I had not know I wouldn't have figured it out, and it's not even visible from a high altitude :| We've been all clickbaited

Can’t find the direct coordinates for google earth, but you can see a couple images in the linked paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...

Since they cover an “area the size of Great Britain” they would be extremely easy to seem from space if there wasn’t vegetation in the way.

There are loads of insect structures visible from space. These guys, for example, are ALL OVER parts of Africa:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nairobi,+Kenya/@-1.0892132...

The phrase "visible from space" has been a gimmick for the last 30 years or so. The ant hill and flowers outside your front door are visible from space nowadays.

I mean, anything is visible from space with the sufficient resolution and zoom. I don't understand how it is supposed to be impressive.

a reddit user accurately commented something along the lines that "even my penis can be seen from space", so this whole "can be seen from space!!!!1" meme is really bit ridiculous.

a quick googling tells me that the highest resolution for satellite imagery is around 40 cm (16 inches). So yes, lots of things are visible from space, including puddles, dogs, small bushes, etc.

I had always interpreted the meaning of the phrase to be "visible by the naked eye from someone in close orbit in space." Was that ever a good interpretation even though now it is perhaps not?

> I had always interpreted the meaning of the phrase to be "visible by the naked eye from someone in close orbit in space."

These termite mounds are certainly not visible by the naked eye, even from a plane.

I'd say that "visible from space" means visible by a current earth observation satellite, which is very far from the naked eye. The worldview satellites that take these images are huge telescopes pointing downwards.

First time I heard it was in a documentary back in the 80s and the phrase was referring to the great wall of china.

With the allowed legal resolution being 0.25 meters and spy satellites certainly having better accuracy, the phrase will soon be obsolete and cease to amaze anyone.

I would think that most reasonable people would agree on that interpretation. The "which are easily visible on Google Earth" is laughable. The title is clearly click bait.

DigitalGlobe publicly sells 30cm imagery. That's limited by statute. Military and intelligence users probably have access to ~7cm imagery.

Actual study posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18493704

"The termites' activities over thousands of years has resulted in huge quantities of soil deposited in approximately 200 million cone-shaped mounds, each about 2.5 meters tall and 9 meters across."

200 million mounds!?!? Over an area the size of Great Britain?

Can anyone take a stab at how many termites and/or termite hours it took to make this happen?

Everytime I read something about termites I can't stop thinking about Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Retreat from Earth".

Awesome short story, go read it. (or listen to it on youtube, but the mouth sound the narrator makes are awful imo)

Everything is visible from space with a large enough lens...

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18504253

It's a bug planet

If you have the tools for it, theorically everything is visible from space.

Doesn't that just mean the space cameras are getting better?

> The mounds, which are easily visible on Google Earth

Most (if not all) google maps 'satellite view' stuff is aerial photos stitched together. So - visible from a plane.

Also these aerial photos were available before the internet. Eg. in Ireland you had to buy them from OSI (Ordinance Survey Ireland) Google simply collected them all for every region and stitched them all together, and also made them free! Which is quite handy.

https://goo.gl/maps/Qfa4nh2iD7o

Zoom in and look at the bottom: Imagery copyright CNES/Airbus, GeoEye.

So, satellites.

None of the 3 attached images show how it looks from space.

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