'Atlantis' gone in new Google map image

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 6 (UPI) -- A Google Earth image with an undersea gridlike pattern some suspected were sunken streets of the mythological city of Atlantis has been updated, official said.

Google said the pattern in an image in Google Ocean, an extension of map program Google Earth, was merely the result of data artifacts from the sonar method oceanographers use to map the seafloor.

When Google uses lots of surveys from different sources together, they sometimes overlap, creating strange gridlike patterns, researchers said.

"The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data," David Sandwell of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California said.

Google has updated the application with new seafloor data that no longer displays the so-called Atlantis artifact, LiveScience.com reported Sunday.