Two weeks into a thermal scanning project, anomalies have been found in Egypt’s Giza pyramids.
The project, called Operation Scan Pyramids, began on October 25th and aimed to discover possible hidden burial chambers inside four pyramids, including the tallest one, Khufu’s (aka the Great Pyramid of Giza).
A team of architects and scientists – from Egypt, France, Canada and Japan – said in a joint statement that they had observed “thermal anomalies” on the monuments, including on the Khufu pyramid.
“The teams have concluded the existence of several thermal anomalies that were observed on all monuments during the heating up or the cooling down phases,” the statement said. “To explain such anomalies a lot of hypothesis and possibilities could be drawn up: presence of voids behind the surface, internal air currents.”
Below you can see an image from the thermal scanning, illustrating the limestone blocks from the Khufu pyramid. The different colors, ranging from dark red to blue, represent varying temperatures, signifying that some of the blocks were hotter than others.
“This anomaly is really quite impressive and it’s just in front of us, at the ground level,” Mehdi Tayoubi, founder of the Paris-based Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, told Discovery News.
While inspecting the area, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said they found “that there is something like a small passage in the ground that you can see, leading up to the pyramids ground, reaching an area with a different temperature. What will be behind it?”
The next steps of the project, which is scheduled to last until the end of 2016, will involve long-term infrared survey of all the monuments.
