We’ve all been there: trawling the internet and clicking through page after page of search engine results.

And though it’s worth it when you finally find your long-lost beloved casserole recipe or the perfect shoes to match your birthday outfit, it’s unlikely that you ever found anything quite as important in the depths of the internet as doctoral researcher Luke Auld-Thomas.

It was only when he came across an old environmental study by the Mexican government that Auld-Thomas spotted something of significance in the laser imagery.

And after significant further study – recently published in the journal Antiquity – Auld-Thomas and his doctoral advisor Professor Marcello A. Canuto at Tulane University revealed what exactly was lurking within the dense vegetation of the Mexican jungle.

Not too far from the Maya city of Xpujil, the team discovered that not only is there an undiscovered Mayan settlement, that it is an impressive one at that.

In a statement from Tulane University, Auld-Thomas explains what they were able to uncover using LiDAR laser imagery:

“Our analysis not only revealed a picture of a region that was dense with settlements, but it also revealed a lot of variability. We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements. We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years.”

The city, known as Valeriana, is not just a settlement. Rather, it is a huge Mayan city consisting of over 6,500 structures with homes, pyramids and land on which the Maya people once worked and lived.

That this ancient city had been hiding just a short stroll away from contemporary Maya civilization shows just how much might still be hidden in the jungle, waiting to be uncovered, as Auld-Thomas explained in the statement:

“The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that, no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

And unlike in the days of explorers coming across settlements on foot, technology like LiDAR makes unveiling and understanding these lost settlements much more convenient and practical for researchers across the world.

Gone are the days of having to leave your family and home for months or even years at a time. Now scientists can – as Auld-Thomas proves – make ground-breaking discoveries from their workplace, or even from home. And the impacts of this, on both our comprehension of ancient societies and our understanding of the world around us, are huge, as Auld-Thomas continues:

“Because LiDAR allows us to map large areas very quickly, and at really high precision and levels of detail, that made us react, ‘Oh wow, there are so many buildings out there we didn’t know about, the population must have been huge.’

The counter argument was that LiDAR surveys were still too tethered to known, large sites, such as Tikal, and therefore had developed a distorted image of the Maya lowlands. What if the rest of the Maya area was far more rural and what we had mapped so far was the exception instead of the rule?”

Though it isn’t yet known why the Maya people moved on from this settlement, one suggestion is that it was a result of climate change – something that we are becoming all too familiar with. And if this settlement was abandoned as a result of climate migration, the ancient site can help us draw on the past to tell us a lot about our future too.

As we continue in our quest to care for our planet, our enhanced understanding to how past civilizations reacted to climatic events is crucial to that, as is a detailed knowledge of what lies within the unexplored areas of our world.

Technology like LiDAR and the ingenuity of researchers like Auld-Thomas is crucial to this quest.

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