Not too long ago, the deserts of the Middle East were largely unexplored. The rough conditions didn’t exactly make them ideal locales for exploration.

Satellite imagery, coupled with the increased usage of remote sensing techniques, made such exploration much easier. Vast areas of desert were mapped, and underground water resources were discovered. Scientists, from different backgrounds, were pouring over images coming from space to study Earth.

But then Google Earth happened. Suddenly, such imagery was not available to scientists alone. Satellite imagery of the whole planet became available at the fingertips of every person with an active internet connection. Updates to Google Earth then also brought space, planets and stars in the picture, allowing millions interested in astronomy around the world to see space like never before.

The availability of these tools so readily has the potential of changing the picture. Scientists are quickly seeing the potential of knowledge crowdsourcing. With millions of people scanning the Earth, there is a true potential to find things that we never did before. And with these tools becoming even better and more accurate, enthusiasts are spending hours everyday exploring, waiting to find “the next big thing.”

A recently discovered meteorite crater in the Western deserts of Egypt was done using Google Earth. Ahmed El-Barkooky, one of the researchers who published a paper in Science studying the crater, said this discovery would not have been possible without Google Earth. The same area where the crater was discovered has been swiped in the 70’s, but low-resolution images meant it was impossible to really make out the crater. The high-resolution images coming up now show the crater in deep detail, with even the ejecta rays showing.

Now, Ahmed El-Fakahany, a developer at IBM in Egypt and astronomy enthusiast, spends hours every day pouring over images of the Sahara desert in Google Earth looking for similar crates. El-Fakahany says he found quite a few craters -as well as several peculiar formations – in the desert in Egypt, though they still need to be verified.

Now Fakahany would like to work with scientists to verify if his finds hold weight or not.

With a few million serious enthusiasts around the world like Fakahany, we might just understand our planet like never possible before.

If the saying that “two minds are better than one” is true, then it is safe to assume that “a million minds are better than one.”