In its ever-expanding coverage of fascinating places, Google's Street View is now bringing viewers images of the remote and beautiful Canadian Arctic hamlet of Cambridge Bay.
You probably haven't heard of the tiny hamlet of Cambridge Bay in Canada's Arctic, but
now you can explore it visually through the latest Google Maps Street View
project, which is capturing images there for preservation in Street View's
ever-expanding global gallery.
The project is being undertaken to continue to build
the most comprehensive and accurate map of Canada's Arctic, according to an
Aug. 22 Google Lat Long Blog post
about the effort by Karin Tuxen-Bettman of Google Earth's Outreach team.
Cambridge Bay is deep
in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut in Canada's Arctic, "surrounded by an
intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice," wrote Tuxen-Bettman.
"High above the Arctic circle, it's a place reachable only by plane or
boat. Zoom in on the map [of the area on Google Maps], 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."
That isolation and
wonder is what brought Google Street View to explore the area.
"There are 4,000
years' worth of stories waiting to be told" in the Cambridge bay
area," wrote Tuxen-Bettman. "We're setting out on an ambitious
mission to tell some of those stories and to build the most comprehensive map
of the region to date. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View
team has traveled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut."
The effort to
photograph Cambridge Bay is involving residents who are using Google's mapping
tools and Street View imaging equipment to capture images of the area,
according to Google. That includes efforts like a community mapping event
"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,"
wrote Tuxen-Bettman. They also added a hospital, daycare facilities, a nine-hole
golf course, a territorial park and the remnants of an ancient Dorset stone
longhouse which pre-dates Inuit culture, she wrote.
To gather more photos,
a specially-equipped Google Street
View trike is being pedaled around the gravel roads of the hamlet so that
volunteers can collect additional images, according to Google.
Cambridge Bay is located on the
southeast coast of Victoria Island at the western end of Queen Maud Gulf
where it narrows into Dease Strait, according to the Nunavut Tourism Website.
The town is the largest stop for passenger and research vessels traversing the
Northwest Passage, with a population of about 1,600 people.
Google Maps has been busy with lots of other Street
View image additions recently.
Powerful new Street View images tracking
the rebuilding of New Orleans following the devastation of 2005's Hurricane
Katrina were announced Aug. 14, while images creating a "virtual
tour" of NASA's historic Kennedy
Space Center were unveiled Aug. 2.
The growing Google Street View collection also includes panoramic views of
notable places around the globe, including Historic Italy, California
National Parks, and highlights of must-see sites in the United States, Poland,
Israel, Russia and the magnificent Swiss Alps.
Google's Street View program has been a source of controversy since it first
started more than five years ago. As part of the program, Google cars have been
sent around the world to take photographs in order to create street-level views
of communities, which then can be accessed by Google users.
In July, Google again drew the ire of British officials over its Street View
program, this time after admitting that it had not deleted all the personal
information collected by the cars in England and other countries, as required
under a 2010 agreement.
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