In 2011, Elliot Higgins was doing admin and finance work for a company that housed refugees in the UK.

Unfortunately, his company lost its government contract that year and had to shut down.

Higgins found himself sitting alone in an empty office with quite a lot of free time on his hands.

Incidentally, 2011 was also when the first Libyan Civil War broke out between forces loyal

to Lydia's dictator Muammar Gaddafi and rebels inspired by the success of other uprisings and armed rebellions in neighboring Arab nations,

such as Egypt and Tunisia. Drawn to news reports covering the unfolding Arab Spring, Higgins spent his days watching YouTube videos taken in Libya and arguing with other Internet Silut about their contents, like for example the location of a town that the rebels claimed to have captured.

And in the video there was a mosque with a dome and a minaret.

It was next to a road that was quite wide.

It had two lanes of traffic separated.

So I went to Google Earth.

I could see the town.

I could see that road running through it.

And when I zoomed in, you can see it was very clearly wide enough based off for example the

width of the cars on the road could use that as a kind of rough measurement and then I followed the road down and I saw a mask with

dome in a minaret and then I started looking at the smaller details in the original video which were things like utility poles for example or the way in which the pavement curved around a certain section of the mosque and all these

list of details which are also visible on the satellite imagery. So you kind of start with a big

clue and then you start narrowing it down down to the smaller and smaller details that you've got

until you've got a perfect match.

By crossing the information found in videos and photos published on social media and news

outlets with Google Earth's satellite imagery, Higgins was able to

closely follow the fighting in Libya and reduce the location of the front lines on a day-by-day

basis.

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