A potential breakthrough?
Notes from the field
The last few weeks of the Ghost Boat project have been pretty grim reading:Sinking boats, dead ends, and now the discovery of mass graves where refugees bodies are dumped. If you’ve stuck with it, you may. But finally — maybe — we think we have a ray of hope that may help us discover whether the occupants of the Ghost Boat are, in fact, alive. We can’t share much now… it’s incredibly sensitive stuff. But the next instalment is going to explain precisely what’s going on: Watch out for it on Wednesday.
Your Weekend Task
Last week a group of readers got together and each contributed a few seconds to make huge progress on our database of boat incidents. Now we have a different request.
We’ve been told by locals that refugees sailing from Libya use lighthouses, oil rigs, and other brightly lit objects near the shore to help them navigate. If we know where those things are located, we can find out what route the Ghost Boat might have taken.
So we’re currently making a spreadsheet of lighthouses, oil platforms, and other offshore objects in Libya and Tunisia. Can take five minutes to hit Google, Wikipedia, or other sources, and help us add to it?
Morsels
dangersquirrel points out this NASA visualization of ocean currents. “Ocean currents are apparently relatively stable over time. Most interesting of all, at least to me, is that the predominant current between Italy and Northern Africa looks like it tends to flow away from Italy and back down the North African coast.” Hilal says she wants to know more about Yafet and his family. Who are they? What do they look like? Well, here’s a photo of Abi and Shalom that Yafet just sent Eric. We’ll be exploring their backstory more in these emails over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile Madison Kahn points to this frankly insane story from Quartz about Syrian refugees who are biking across the Arctic Circle to reach Europe — testament to the lengths to which people will go to find safety.
And finally this week, we wanted to say thank you for your time and energy. We’re making progress all the time because of your involvement, and the more people we have in this community, the more momentum we’ll have. So, please, take a moment to share the project with your friends, family, online or offline communities. Every person could make a huge difference.
Onward.
