What have the Chinese been up to? Google Earth reveals more strange patterns in the Chinese desert but you need to look pretty closely
Google Earth has revealed yet more strange patterns in the deserts of central China, but this time the researcher who found them thinks she knows why they\'re there.
Last year MailOnline reported how a satellite spotted strange grid-like structures in the Gobi desert, a discovery which sparked a wave of fearful speculation as their purpose.
Now Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, an assistant professor of physics at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, highlighted another mysterious pattern in the Taklamakan desert in western China.
Enigma: The mysterious grids in the Taklamakan desert in western China, which were discovered by an Italian academic using Google Earth
She has been a pioneer of a kind of armchair archaeology using Google Earth in conjunction with open-source image processing software to track down curious structures in remote parts of the world.
Her latest discovery, reported in MIT\'s Physics arXiv blog， is an 8km long line of squares in the desert just south of the town of Ruoqiang
她最新的发现， 报道在MIT的物理学博客上，是个在沙漠南部小镇8千米长的路线排成的方形
Zooming in on the squares reveals them to be 40m/sq grids of what seem to be mounds or similar rough structures, arranged like a giant mountain bike tyre track rolling across the desert.
Professor Sparavigna has been able to roughly date the grids, pointing out that Google Earth\'s satellite images, on which all the grids are visible, date back to 2004, while they are not on older images from Bing or Nokia Maps.
Last year\'s discovery of bizarre patterns in the Gobi desert in China\'s north-east interior led to a number of theories as to what the secretive superpower might be up to.
去年在中国东北内部的戈壁沙漠发现的神秘图案产生出许多关于这些隐蔽的神秘力量可能会做什么的理论
A message to aliens? One of the grids discovered via Google Earth in the Gobi desert last year, which launched a wave of fearful speculation as to their purpose
