16:32 11 May 2016
William Gadoury, from Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, discovered a lost Mayan City by comparing star charts with satellite images. The new city, which the teenager named “Mouth of Fire”, is thought to be the fourth biggest Mayan City.
William has been fascinated by the Mayans and his interest was sparked by the Mayan calendar that predicted the 2012 apocalypse. His fascination drove him to analyse 22 Mayan star maps from ancient books and overlaid the star positions onto Google Earth images of the Yucatan Peninsula. In his research, he found that 117 Mayan cities matched the star positions, with the brightest stars representing more major cities.
While overlaying the 23rd constellation, he found that there were three stars but only two known ancient cities. To confirm his findings, William worked with the Canadian Space Agency which provided him images from their RADARSAT-2 satellite; a 2 billion US dollar satellite with cutting-edge terrain mapping abilities. This gave him images of the new location of the city, which was covered in thick vegetation.
He then collaborated with Remote Sensing expert Dr. Armand Larocque from the University of New Brunswick who proved that the 15 year old had found a major city with 30 buildings and an 86-metre pyramid.