What Would You Do To Save a Life?
How readers pushed forward the investigation to find a group of vanished refugees.
It’s summer in the Mediterranean right now. The sun shines constantly, the waters are warmer and calmer, and millions of holidaymakers flock to the beautiful coasts of countries like Italy, Greece and Spain.
Across the water, however, things are a lot more grim. All the things that make this time of year appealing for tourists also make it high season for human trafficking. It’s the time of year when people smugglers go into overdrive.
The number of rickety boats moving across the Mediterranean seems to increase each summer, with predictably tragic results. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 1,000 people died attempting the sea crossing just this last week. Over and over again, pictures of distressed refugees, bodies of drowned migrants, and photographs of babies in peril are filling the news.
Taken as a whole, the crisis can seem overwhelming. It can feel like the world is left watching, frozen by apathy or the inability to make a difference. But we think there’s a way to have an impact. And so do thousands of you.
In mid April, we started the latest — and perhaps final — effort to track down 243 people who disappeared with the vessel we call the Ghost Boat. We had archived satellite photos of the Libyan coast when the ship disappeared, and we asked readers to join us in sifting through to make potential sightings.
The strategy was a gamble. To be frank, we were searching what experts call “the dead zone” of Libyan territorial waters — where international craft and NGOs are not even allowed travel, where little is public, and where almost anything can happen without reaching the attention of the international community.
But, with the families of the missing still desperate for information, there was an awful lot at stake. It was worth the risk.
Your response was overwhelming.
This weekend, volunteers — people like you — completed the satellite search. More than 75,000 people took part: an astonishing achievement.
Readers who have been helping all the way along joined in, as well as thousands of new participants, to enter more than 200,000 data points, covering an area of more than 8,500 square kilometers. This makes it one of the largest campaigns that has ever been conducted by our partners at DigitalGlobe, and puts us in the best possible position we could hope for to find visual evidence of the boat.
Thanks to your efforts, DigitalGlobe’s system has identified around 2,000 potential boat sightings close to the time Ghost Boat may have disappeared. Now, we can sift through those data clusters, examine the photographs, and cross-reference them with other information we have to see if we can determine which of these sightings — if any — are worthy of further investigation.
We’re working on this data, but we’re making the files available to the public so you can also work on mapping them yourselves, should you be interested.
By itself, this data won’t answer the Ghost Boat mystery. But it brings us one step closer to knowing whether we can solve it. The massive number of people who contributed to the campaign also lets the families know that the world has not forgotten about their suffering.
We are continuing to push the investigation forward. And, as we process the data from DigitalGlobe, we’ll be in touch to let you know what we find and what it means.
For now, as the tragedy of the Mediterranean refugee crisis surges on and policy makers around the world struggle to respond, you’ve shown that ordinary people do care and are motivated enough to do what they can to make a difference.
Thank you.
