The National Geographic Society is looking to enlist the help of armchair archaeologists to find the lost tomb of Genghis Khan.

The society’s Valley of the Khans project is looking for additional amateur archaeologists to sift through satellite imagery of the region in Mongolia provided by the GeoEye-1 and Ikonos satellites and mark what they think could be ancient tombs, roads, rivers or other anomalies.

So far 5,614 users have interpreted and tagged 142,675 images that are informing the on-the-ground fieldwork of the expedition team.

Users can be trained via online video instruction to interpret these images for ancient land changes that could indeed be the mystical buried tomb of the ancient leader.

The project is the brainchild of Albert Lin of the University of California, San Diego, who recognised that crowd sourcing provided a way of overcoming some the project’s challenges which relied on a small team with a huge area of land to scan.

Lin’s team are also employing a huge wall of monitors known as a HIPerSpace wall to help visualise large expanses of land at a high resolution, as well as using StarCAVE, a 3D visualisation room which surrounds researchers with images in better-than-HD resolution.

Lin says he sees parallels between the collaborative work he's doing and Genghis Khan’s use of new technologies.

"He took the best resources of entire world – whether weaponry or medicine – and adopted those technologies into his own methodology. We're trying to implement that same adaptation to many disciplines into our own work,” Lin told Science Daily.