Usually it takes years of study to become an archaeologist—four years of reading books and a few more learning in the field before you finally get to play in the dirt professionally. Sarah Parcak wants to get that down to a few minutes. Parcak is a space archaeologist, which means she spends her days looking for buried archaeological sites in high resolution imagery. It's a technical job: Parcak, who teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has a PhD, and so do most of her archaeology colleagues. But Parcak believes that finding and protecting all of Earth’s hidden gems is going to take more than just professionally-trained scientists.

So today, Parcak is launching GlobalXplorer, an online platform that will teach anyone with a computer and an internet connection how to spot archaeological sites in satellite imagery. Parcak first outlined her plans for the platform last year at TED, explaining that the most time-consuming part of her job was scouring thousands of square miles of satellite imagery for visual anomalies on Earth’s surface. Crowdsourcing that process, she hopes, will allow professional archaeologists to speed up the discovery process.

It's worked in the past. Since it launched in 2012, citizen science platform EyeWire has enlisted more than 200,000 people to help map the 3-D structures of neurons, resulting in a peer reviewed paper in Nature. Another, called Galaxy Zoo, is using crowdsourcing to classify galaxies in order to better understand how they form, and yet anther, Foldit, focuses on identifying the folding patterns of proteins. Archaeology, by contrast, tends to be lower-tech, but crowdsourcing makes a lot of sense when you think about how much land still needs to be explored.

To make that happen, first Parcak needs to train the rest of her collaborators. Before someone can begin looking for sites, they'll watch tutorials on spotting landscape features commonly associated with looting pits, encroachments, and underground archaeological sites. You learn, for example, that looting pits come in clusters; they often take on a contrasting color to the rest of the satellite image, and sometimes they're marked by parallel lines that signal machinery like a bulldozer was used.

Just like terrestrial archaeology, GlobalXplorer is centered around expeditions. The first is in Peru, where online archaeologists will look at more than 200,000 square kilometers of land, broken into 100x100 meter tiles scrubbed of GPS and mapping data. “We treat it like patient data,” Parcak says. Citizen scientists will click through these tiles, which increase in difficulty as they progress. People start with identifying looting, and after 500 completed tiles make their way to identifying encroachment structures, or illegal construction that happens on a site. Finally, after they've gotten the hang of looking at satellite imagery, the platform allows them to say whether or not they see some form of archaeological site. More than discovery, the goal of the platform is to eliminate large swaths of land that have no archaeological features. “All it leaves for us [the professionals] is the 1 to 5 percent of the landscape that might actually contain something interesting,” says Parcak.

To ensure quality, each player will get a score based on their accuracy. “If the people answering have a higher overall ranking, we’ll need fewer people to say a thing is a thing,” says Parcak. Once enough people say they see (or don’t see) something, Parcak and her team will look at the tile to verify that there is, in fact, an archaeological feature before passing that information along to archaeologists on the ground.

Like EyeWire and Foldit, the success of GlobalXplorer depends on a lot of people using it regularly. “We needed to create something that people wouldn’t just dip into for 10 minutes,” Parcak says. She and her team designed GlobalXplorer to work like a game. The crowd ranked score is part of that. But Parcak wanted to give people other incentives to come back. As you make your way through the platform, you unlock extra videos, photos, and stories made for the platform by National Geographic. Later, archaeologists in the field can take their virtual participants with them on digs, using video and livestreamed Periscopes.

If it works, GlobalXplorer will provide a satisfying feedback loop that directly connects citizen scientists to the people doing on-the-ground research. And that, you can imagine, is the biggest incentive of all. Because it's one thing to play a game—it's another to see with your own eyes how your contribution pushes science forward.