Your Google Maps link is to Montauban, the préfecture of Tarn-et-Garonne and hence a good few hundred miles from the Western Front. You presumably meant Montauban-de-Picardie, which is very much on the Somme battlefield. It’s about 6 km west of the T.G.V. Nord/Eurostar line, though I don’t think the village is visible from the train. I agree that there’s no obvious evidence of the battle in the Google Maps images of the area.
Well, at least I managed to point it at France.
The resolution limit of the human eye does not mean that the trenches would need to be that wide. In principle, they wouldn’t even need to be that long: Any star that you see in the night sky is far smaller in apparent size than the resolution limit of the eye, and you can see them just fine. The only case where the angular resolution limit of the eye would be relevant would be in trying to tell the difference between one trench and a pair of trenches side by side.
The trenches might have had low contrast, and if they were very narrow compared to the resolution limit, the effective contrast would be even lower. Still, though, the human eye and brain are very good at picking patterns out of images, even low-contrast images, especially patterns consisting of lines. I don’t know any of the specifics for this case, so this is just a SWAG, but I would strongly suspect that trenches could be seen by a human looking out the window of the Shuttle, but not from the Moon (which is much, much further away than the Shuttle can ever get). I would not even be very surprised if the remains of some WWI trenches could still be seen from Shuttle height (even if they’re no longer visible from ground level).
Now that you mentioned it . . . World War I in Color
Oh wow, thanks Walloon!
Cite?
Article from Google Librarian Central. The horse’s mouth
Thanks for that. Ignorance fought.
There seems to be a very widespread misconception that the high-res Google Maps/Google Earth images are taken from satellites, and I don’t know where it came from!
When zooming in on areas with high-res imagery, you can clearly see the “jump” as you go from fairly fuzzy satellite images to crisp, detailed aerial photography.
I would post a link to illustrate this, but Google Maps seems to have gone on a go-slow at the moment and the imagery won’t load at all.
Even though Google Doesn’t use them, there are some very high resolution spy satellites: Reconnaissance satellite - Wikipedia
The button to turn the “satellite” photo layer on inside Google Maps says “Satellite”, so perhaps it is not so surprising.
I’m no expert on the resolution of the human eyeball but I would think that the Western Front battle zone would be readily apparent as a very “non-green” swath of land cutting across France. You wouldn’t have seen the trenches themselves, but I would think you’d see the scars of the blown up forests and torn up uncultivated farm fields.
I know that the close-up imagery used for my county is aerial. not satellite. Google is using the imagery that we (county GIS folks) generated via an aerial imagery contractor. Since it’s public domain, there’s nothing restricting Google from using it.
After almost 100 years?
I remember reading in school (during the 1970s) about farmers in France, Netherlands, etc, plowing up old artillery shells and bombs as they worked their fields and how dangerous it was for them to do so at times. So, it would seem to me that the land is indeed being used and may not be the barren soil some seem to envision. Not anymore, anyways.
(Didn’t Time or someone recently show a lovely field of poppies that was the site of one of the more vicious WW-I battles?)
While the site doesn’t say so, those pictures derive from the French government’s effort to document the war using photographers from Albert Kahn’s Archive of the Planet project; this is the basis for the recent superb BBC series The Edwardians in Colour that I was raving about in this CS thread.
This site discusses the photographers involved and this blog post has a good set of related links.
Nature will easily take back over in just a few years, or human cultivation/construction.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are functioning cities after being nuked just 70 years ago.
Zombie thread, and not much new being added. Closed for now. If anyone at anytime can add something new and significant to the discussion, email me to reopen it.
samclem, Moderator, GQ