A Hidden Ghost Town Found in the Middle of the Pacific Ocean

Jakarta –

An aerial survey using precise laser technology revealed the existence of Nan Madol, a hidden city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Because no one lives there, Nan Madol is known as the Ghost Town.

There is a mystery to this interesting discovery, how advanced Nan Madol was when people lived in the city during that time, and how the city is now hidden in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Quoted from WIO News, Nan Madol is also known as the Venice of the Pacific. This megalithic stone age city has sometimes been compared to the mythical Atlantis and now researchers are putting all their energy into finding the ruins of Nan Madol and intend to preserve it as a World Heritage Site. UNESCO world.

The results of an aerial survey using laser mapping (Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)) revealed a wide and extensive landscape of agricultural features hidden under the vegetation of Temwen Island.

This discovery rewrote the cultural history of the Pacific Islands and explained how the people, who were believed to have depended on tropical natural resources and fishing for subsistence, greatly involved in sophisticated agricultural planning.

“LiDAR can reveal entire archaeological landscapes hidden under thick vegetation. This has led to its comparison with radiocarbon data as an innovative technological advance in archaeology,” said the researchers.

Here’s what researchers found in Ghost Town. Scientists, led by the Baltimore Foundation for Research and Cultural Site Management (CSRM) deciphered the network of irrigation terraces that once provided clean water to Nan Madol and in its dense tropical foliage where more ruins still remain hide

Archaeologists believe that Nan Madol was a prominent city from 1100 to 1628 AD and its decline began with the fall of the local Saudeleur kings in the 17th century.

“The consensus among archaeologists is that agriculture was not intensified in Micronesia through formal field systems,” said the director of the research project, Dr. Douglas Comer.

Dr. Comer’s team, while working with the local College of Micronesia, along with Stanford, Sandia National Laboratories, and others, have questioned long-held ideas about which cultures thrives on fermented breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis).

In a press release from the US State Department, he said that the complex system of irrigation areas that cover Temwen Island indicates the existence of early taro tuber farming.

“The Temwen system is also similar to several Polynesian terrace systems, including the Kohala field system on Hawaii Island,” the researchers wrote in the journal Remote Sensing in 2019.

“Such complexity is consistent with what can be seen in LiDAR images at Temwen,” they said.

(rns/rns)