Lost Cities of the Silk Road

In 1992 I joined a China Exploration and Research Society project to use radar remote sensing to look for lost cities under the sands of the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China. Key to the project is a revolutionary remote sensing device called SIR-C. Carried by Space Shuttle Endeavor in two 1994 flights, SIR-C has the potential to reveal man-made artifacts hidden for two thousand years beneath desert sands. Since 1994 I have spent many hours in the computer labs of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, processing and enhancing SIR-C radar images of the Taklamakan, identifying unnatural-looking features that hint at the presence of man.

In 1997 CERS shifted its focus to wildlife programs, leaving the Silk Road project high and dry. At that time I met an American archeologist named Adam Kessler whose lifelong passion has been to investigate China's ancient world. He was looking for people to help him form the Eurasian Origins Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to researching early civilizations on the Eurasian continent. Together we are seeking funding for a joint American-Chinese expedition into the "deep desert" of the Taklamakan to ground truth SIR-C images and possibly discover previously unknown archeological sites. Ruins discovered elsewhere in the Tarim Basin have produced artifacts such as tombs, temples, frescoes, statues, and scrolls--crucial clues that allow us to track migration of peoples and ideas across Eurasia.

• Brief project summary.
• Detailed project proposal and Eurasian Origins Foundation Prospectus
• Radar versus ordinary (visible-light) photography. What's the difference?
• Field Reports
  • 1993 Reconnaissance mission field report. This journey along the southern Taklamakan took us to several known Silk Road ruins sites.
  • 1995 image analysis report--answers the question, what do the images look like, and can we see any cities in them?
  • Spring 1997 project update A comprehensive project report including image processing methodology and a full-resolution annotated radar image sample. (This document is on a NASA website; click BACK to return here.)
  • Fall 1997 geocoding mission field report. A field mission undertaken by me that supplied crucial positional information to the radar images.
• NASA SIR-C Resources On-line
  • Radar Imaging Home Page.
  • Other projects using SIR-C.
  • Explanation of how SIR-C works.
  • Detailed articles about the research results of other SIR-C/X-SAR investigators.
• Low-resolution sample radar image of the Takalamakan [65K]. See any cities in here? For a high-resolution image, see the spring 1997 report listed above.
• A modern-day journey on the Silk Road--illustrated article by Pamela Logan, originally published in Asia Magazine, written for a general audience.
• Gallery of Silk Road photos.
• Silkroad Foundation, a collection of articles and other resources concerning the history, culture, and archeology of the Silk Road.
• The Ubar Project. How Spaceborne Imaging Radar helped to find a lost city in the Arabian Desert.