Google announced that it is setting out on a new mapping mission, sending its Street View team up the furthest north in Canada it has ever gone, in order to map out Cambridge Bay in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada’s Arctic. In fact, it’s the Street View team’s first visit to Nunavut altogether.
It’s a location “surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice,” as Google puts it. “High above the Arctic circle, it’s a place reachable only by plane or boat. Zoom in on the map, and this isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (‘musk ox’) Street and Tigiganiak (“fox”) Road,” Google says.
Check out some of these photos Google has on Panoramio for the area:
Image credit: R. Halim
Image credit: Timothy K.
Image credit: Timothy K.
Google is sending the Street View trike (pictured at the top), which it uses to photograph business interiors, but Google is relying on some help from the locals.
“We first met Chris, who works for the nonprofit Nunavut Tunngavik, last September at our Google Earth Outreach workshop in Vancouver, where he learned how to edit Google Maps data using Google Map Maker,” writes Karin Tuxen-Bettman of the Google Earth Outreach team on the Official Google Blog. “Today [Wednesday] Chris played host to a community Map Up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from the nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chromebooks and used Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada’s North. But they didn’t stop there. Using both English and Inuktitut, one of Nunavut’s official languages, they added the hospital, daycare, a nine-hole golf course, a territorial park and, finally, the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture.”
Google will train Chris and others in the community to use some of its equipment, so they can travel to other places in the area, and help Google map the Canadian Arctic.