Find Gil and Ben

As you may have heard, our good friends Gil Weiss and Ben Horne are currently missing in Peru. This hits incredibly close to home as the Tomnod crew are all climbers, explorers and adventurers and we have climbed many epic summits with Ben and Gil. Gil and Ben have been missing for 5-10 days. They went to climb a new route on the South face of Palcaraju Oeste in Peru. A search team is on site, found their tent and spotted their tracks coming off the summit down to about 5,800 meters.
Fortunately, we are able to help the search team, even from far away. Using current satellite imagery, crowdsourcing and a crowd of people who want to help, we are finding clues that are being relayed to the rescuers on the ground.

Gil and Ben pose on the Palisades Traverse (photo: Brad Wilson)

Our friends at DigitalGlobe and GeoEye have been incredibly helpful in providing imagery and support. Now people can quickly get to work looking through the imagery. Within a day we were able to get WorldView-2 to snap a picture and put it on Tomnod’s GlobalInsight platform. Now climbers, readers, technologists, people who care — and you — can help by donating time (or money to support the air search).

To help, go here: http://tomnod.com/gi/peru/

People are already spotting tracks and even the three members of the ground rescue team.

What looks like the three rescuers identified using crowdsourcing in the satellite image

So far, hundreds of people have contributed 2,421 tags (and counting). I am convinced that if there are clues in the satellite imagery, we will find them regardless of how subtle they are. We are currently collecting the crowd’s consensus points and following up on the leads to generate a collection of locations to direct the ground and air support teams in Peru.

Each of the points represents a clue in the imagery that people have spotted.

Amazingly, lower on the mountain we see the trail begin to appear as people contribute tags along it.

Take Action Now!
http://tomnod.com/gi/peru/