By Sara Pintilie/reporter
Google Earth is getting an educational boost. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum launched a new project surrounding the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.
The Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping initiative brings awareness to the massive genocide in Darfur.
Google Earth is a nifty interactive tool. Users can search around the globe via satellite and see their homes or tourist attractions.
Well-known places have pictures that accompany them and links to download more information. The program even offers virtual tours of tourist hot spots.
The newest version of Google Earth depicts Darfur with various icons scattered over the area. Each fire icon represents a damaged and destroyed villages with a tab showing the date of destruction and the number of structures damaged.
A blue pyramid icon shows how many people were displaced.
The site hasn’t been updated since October, but I still found it interesting.
By zooming in on the villages, according to an article on www.time.com, one can see destroyed remnants.
Also the site includes videos, pictures and testimony from Darfur natives.
What a great way to bring awareness to the Darfur conflict. According to the USHMM Web site, about 300 thousand people have been killed and 2.5 million have fled their homes.
“ Educating today’s generation about the atrocities of the past and present can be enhanced by technologies such as Google Earth,” Sara Bloomfield, USHMM director, said. “When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative will make it that much harder to ignore those who need us the most.”
Along with photos of Darfur, hi-resolution pictures of concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Warsaw, have been added.
Google Earth has recently taken heat for replacing post-Katrina pictures with ones taken before the 2005 hurricane.
They fixed the images and now users can see the hurricane damage in New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.
Both the Holocaust and Darfur awareness programs have to be downloaded in addition to Google Earth. I accessed them from the museum’s Web site, www.ushmm.org.
This program should bring awareness to the genocide, even if it is just to the 200 million people with Google Earth.
