New Unannounced Smoothing of Terrain?

I have an island that had some nice craggy variations in terrain, a result of noise I purposely put into the RAW file. Last night all the uneven parts suddenly became smoothed over.

Is there a new method the servers are using to compute the terrain mesh? Anyone else seeing this?

This could be a result of level-of-detail changes. When you're far away from a piece of terrain, it will get smoothed, because SL will render a less detailed version of that land to save time on rendering. If you wan tot see more details further out, mess with the "land detail" slider in the advanced graphics preferences.