In 2024, a Mayan megacity was discovered in Campeche, Mexico. Swallowed by the rainforest, this lost urban center contained pyramids, plazas, amphitheaters, and highways. But this discovery wasn’t made by a team of seasoned explorers hacking through the rainforest with machetes. It was made by a Ph.D. student. And he found it by accident.
“I was on something like page 16 of a Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” Luke Auld-Thomas, who is pursuing his doctorate at Tulane University, explained to the BBC in October. That overlooked, decade-old survey contained groundbreaking information hidden in plain sight.
The survey used light detection and ranging (lidar) technology, a remote-sensing method that sends thousands of laser pulses from an aircraft to map objects buried beneath vegetation. The system measures how long it takes for the signals to bounce back,…
