Nagasaki Archive Uses Google Earth to Preserve the Accounts of Survivors

It has now been almost 65 years since the first, and thankfully the last time, an atomic bomb was used in combat. The numbers of survivors of the attacks is getting smaller and soon there will be no one left to tell the story first hand. The Nagasaki Archive is a website dedicated to highlighting the stories of some of the survivors and provide context with the help of Google Earth.

“ ‘Nagasaki Archive’ is an attempt to reorganize all of those information on a digital virtual globe (google earth). In order to make Nagasaki the last place on earth where the A-bomb struck, we hope that many people to interact with and learn from ‘Nagasaki Archive’,” the website reads.

“You can see photos from the same angle they were taken 65 years ago, and also you click the portrait of survivors to read their experiences and wishes associated with the actual location they were exposed to A - bomb,” it continues.

The website is mainly in Japanese, but there is an English version as well. The translation is not perfect at times, but it doesn’t get in the way of understanding and navigating the site. The stories of only six survivors have been translated so far, but the people behind the project hope to have more done in time.

The Nagasaki Archive leverages the Google Earth plugin to put all of the data it stores in context. It shows the blast radius of the bomb and also provides aerial imagery of the city shortly after the explosion superimposed over the current imagery, to highlight the reconstruction. The site also features a large number of photos, of the city and the survivors, placed at actual location and at the angle they were taken at. There are plans to create a similar archive for the Hiroshima bombing. [via Google Earth Blog]