![]() Over the years, various names have been given to this lost city, the most common being Ubar, Wabar, and Iram of the Pillars. "Is the city of Ubar identical to Iram of the Pillars or is the legendary lost city still buried beneath the sand?" Still, many feel this intriguing question remains unanswered: They found shards of pottery and other evidence of the trade routes, but nothing to show they had definitively found the city." The team made a brief, preliminary expedition to Oman last summer, searching about 35 sites. Derivative work, credit: Shaibalahmar - Public DomainĪrmed with this information, they enlisted archeologist Juris Zarins of Southwest Missouri State University and British explorer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, who had served with the British military in the deserts of Oman and fought with the sultan's forces. Satellite photograph of South Arabia showing hypothetical locations of lost cities. Junctions, where the trade routes converged or branched, seemed likely locations for the lost city. Using the imagery, the team picked out the ancient trade routes, which were packed down into hard surfaces by the passage of hundreds of thousands of camels. The radar could "see" through the overlying sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features. Juris Zarins, an archeologist with extensive experience in Arabia and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the famed Arctic explorer.Clapp persuaded JPL scientists Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom to scan the region with a unique shuttle radar system flown on the Challenger's last successful mission. Other members of the expedition include Nicholas Clapp, a Los Angeles based documentary film producer George R. Landsat 5, the French SPOT satellite and the shuttle-borne large format camera. Ronald Blom have continued looking for Ubar from space using radar images taken from the shuttle and other images taken from the U.S. ![]() Robert Crippen, a JPL research geologist, and Dr. Charles Elachi, JPL assistant laboratory director of the Office of Space Science and Instruments, Dr. In 1984, the shuttle Challenger made two passes over an unmapped region of southern Oman and studied the area with Shuttle Imaging Radar B (SIR-B). Nicholas Clapp, a Los Angeles documentary film maker, contacted the Laboratory with the idea of using the Shuttle Imaging Radar to look beneath the sand of the southern Arabian desert. JPL's involvement in the search for the lost city of Ubar dates to 1981. The great variety of artifacts discovered at the site demonstrates that it was an important trading center linked by extensive trade routes to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. There, the explorers uncovered the remains of towers, rooms and other artifacts that appear to date back to before 2000 B.C. The result of this work led the expedition to the site of a remote well on the edge of the Empty Quarter. We could never have surveyed the vast area where Ubar may have been, nor could we be confident of its location without the advantage of computer enhanced images from space," Blom continued.Īnalysis of the images was used to direct ground reconnaissance expeditions throughout the region in the summer of 1990 and the fall of 1991. "One can easily separate many modern and ancient tracks on the computer enhanced images because older tracks often go directly under very large sand dunes. Ronald Blom, a JPL geologist specializing in remote sensing. "I was surprised to find that we were able to readily detect ancient tracks in the enhanced shuttle radar and satellite images," said Dr. The use of spaceborne radar, a device that can penetrate the dry sand, and enhanced satellite images allowed scientists to detect tracks of caravan routes leading to the city. The location of the ancient city has been lost for centuries in the drifting desert sand. Shuttle Imaging Radar and other spaceborne images of the Arabian desert, produced utilizing JPL technology and expertise, played a key role in the recent discovery of a lost city on the edge of the Empty Quarter in southern Oman.Ī team of scientists and archaeologists from the United States, Britain and Oman have discovered the site of the legendary lost city of Ubar, a major hub for trading frankincense which dates back to the year 3000 B.C.
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