Apr 11, 2016
You Could Help Find 243 Missing People: Join in Now
Our search for a group of refugees who vanished is taking to the ocean—and you can take part in a new satellite search.
When we started searching for the Ghost Boat—a group of 243 men, women and children who disappeared while fleeing oppression in Africa—we didn’t know where we’d end up. What we did know, though, was that it would take every ounce of ingenuity and energy, and probably more than a little luck, to find out what happened to these refugees.
Over the last six months, we’ve spoken to dozens of sources, worked hundreds of hours, and seen thousands of contributions. But we still don’t know what happened to the Ghost Boat.
So now, with our options narrowing, we’re turning to a new way to search for them. Satellite imagery.
Our friends at DigitalGlobe have retrieved dozens of images of the Libyan coast from around the time the boat disappeared. Now they are making them publicly available via their crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod, for others to sift through and find evidence of the boat.
Today, we’re opening that search up to the public.
Here’s what we’re asking you to do.
We have satellite photographs covering the parts of the Libyan coast where we believe the Ghost Boat is most likely to have departed from. It’s a large zone of interest, several thousand square kilometers, stretching eight miles or so into the Mediterranean.
To make it searchable, we’re slicing up the images into easy-to-digest chunks and allowing anyone to go and look at those slices to look for visual evidence. What are we looking for? Anything that could indicate a boat’s presence — an actual vessel, or maybe an oil slick left behind by a ship in distress.
As you check a map tile for unusual activity, flag up anything that might be of interest. Tomnod’s algorithms take a look at every report that is made, and help determine which information is worth following up. Over time, as more and more people take part, this provides us with information we can trace back to understand where the occupants of the boat might be today. (If you want to know more, there are FAQs here)
It’s fair to say that looking for a 20 meter fishing boat in 17,000 square kilometers of ocean is a gigantic, slightly preposterous task. But right now this might just be our best option for uncovering a lead.
It’s a search method that is proven to work, and you are part of a group of readers who care a great deal about finding a result.
So, please:
You might just find the answer we’ve been looking for all along.
