On the team, a jungle warfare expert leapt into action. The business end of the fer-de-lance, tied to a tree in the middle of camp to impress upon everyone the risk of venomous snakes. Docile enough during the day, but when one slithered into camp under the cover of darkness, it caused an understandable panic. The deadliest? A pit viper called the fer de lance. “They were either man-made or the world’s most intelligent gophers were out there, doing things they’d never done before,” Benenson said. A LIDAR-scanned map of the jungle in Honduras. The LIDAR made visible what looked like rectangular structures, including two perfectly linear lines, and a right angle. What the LIDAR revealed - once that jungle canopy was removed - shocked everyone on the team. “It seemed like a valuable gamble.”Ī gamble that soon paid off. “This technology could see through the jungle canopy and potentially reveal the contours of what might be underneath it,” Benenson said. The problem? It was expensive, and Elkins needed a backer.Įnter documentary filmmaker Bill Benenson, who agreed to foot the million-dollar-plus bill if he could capture the adventure on film. Peering through a hole cut in the bottom of an old Cessna Skymaster, it could scan hundreds of square miles of dense jungle in a matter of days. Lengthy discussions of scientific equipment, aircraft, landing zones and, later, infectious diseases, while fascinating on their own, feel somewhat superfluous and ill-placed.Read an excerpt from Douglas Preston’s “The Lost City of the Monkey God”īut this time Elkins had something no previous expeditions to the area did: a piece of impressive technology called LIDAR, a laser mapping system. The book originated as an article in National Geographic and it may have been a better story if kept restrained to magazine size.
Preston unspools the history of the White City, the expedition and the journey itself in detail - sometimes in too much detail.
Their intent was to map the city as well as explore and protect its rumored riches. They brought along a new piece of NASA-owned laser technology known as LIDAR or Light Detection and Ranging, which confirmed a sprawling metropolis inhabited around the same time as the Mayan civilization in modern-day Mexico. They faced floods, mountains, jaguars, deadly snakes, disease-carrying insects and other inherent challenges. In 2012, Preston joined a group of scientists, archaeologists, photographers and film producers who traveled to La Mosquitia, an unexplored and dangerous region of Central American jungle.
0 kommentar(er)
