Enlarge / NatGeo Explorer Albert Lin sits on the edge of a cliff during his quest to find the lost city of the Cloud Warriors in Peru. (credit: National Geographic/Disney/Rochio Lira)
National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin is something of a modern-day Indiana Jones, traveling to remote locations all over the globe to take part in a variety of archaeological missions. His most recent expeditions are chronicled in the new NatGeo documentary series, Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Lin, premiering on Thanksgiving Day. The episode ("The Warrior King") follows Lin as he navigates a sacred mountain and a flooded tomb underneath a pyramid in the Sudanese desert, hunting for the lost capital of the Kingdom of Kush.
A California native, Lin holds a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He subsequently founded UCSD's Center for Human Frontiers, which focuses on harnessing technology to augment human potential. So it's not surprising that he first made a name for himself by combining satellites, aerial remote sensing (drones), and Lidar mapping with more traditional ground exploration to hunt for the missing tomb of Genghis Khan in 2009.
The Valley of the Khans Project also successfully employed crowdsourcing (via more than 10,000 online volunteers) to help analyze the resulting satellite and aerial photography images, looking for unusual features across the vast landscape. That led to the confirmation of 55 archaeological sites in the region, a 2011 NatGeo documentary, and a 2014 scientific paper detailing the benefits of so-called "collective reasoning" to archaeology.
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