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Homer's Ithaca


I saw this story on the BBC news site, and it reminded me that Mr Bittlestone originally used NASA World Wind to help find this location.

The location of Greek hero Odysseus’ homeland – the island of Ithaca described in the poet Homer’s Odyssey – is a mystery that has baffled scholars for nearly 3,000 years. Now this ancient enigma has been solved with the help of World Wind, NASA’s 3D planetary visualisation tool.

So I asked Withak to use World Winds new terrain graph feature to plot a cross section, you can see the results in the screenshot above, they seem to back up Mr Bittlestone’s theory.

withak notice how all the east-facing slopes are roughly the same grade and the west-facing slopes are roughly the same grade?
withak the only difference is in that flatter west-facing part where i put the green line
withak that suggests the flatter part got there by sliding off the steeper part to the east
withak i’m not familiar with the geology there so i might be completely wrong 🙂

The location can be seen in World Wind on this WWC hotspots page, click the worldwind:// button to send your copy of World Wind to the location.

Please note –

withak – you would be surprised how much reasonable-sounding but completely incorrect stuff someone with just enough geology background to be dangerous can come up with 🙂

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  1. […] Unbound used World Wind as a research tool, see these earlier blog posts Homer’s Ithaca and Homer’s Ithaca, well here is their latest press release – PRESS RELEASE – Friday January 4 […]

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