Netflix and Chill: A Chilling Story That Includes Some of My Favorite Mapping

As a film school alum, documentaries have a special place in my heart. Netflix, with their intuitive algorithm, knows this all too well as I get a steady diet of recommendations that turn a productive weekend plan into a semi-productive stream of video watching. I have found myself especially captivated by the readily available and highly-informative Smithsonian Channel Netflix content. This past weekend, a Smithsonian documentary called Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine stole my productivity related intentions.

The incredibly sad and sobering reality of Treblinka is enough to make one lose their appetite, but the work being chronicled in this documentary is highly important and needs to be shared. For over seventy years the facts of the site were shrouded with a lack of physical evidence. The forensic archaeologist at the center of this story was trying to discover irrefutable evidence of the existence of the mass-killing gas chambers. She couldn’t just dig around the sacred site, so she went to a reliable source that I am quite familiar with – aerial lidar.

Aerial lidar, something Continental Mapping (my employer) is an expert in, works through use of a laser sensor mounted to an aircraft (helicopter, airplane, or UAV). The sensor scans the area below, with the relevant benefit to this particular story being its ability to penetrate dense vegetation and produce a bare-earth surface. Some of my favorite projects in the Continental Mapping project library are cultural preservation works that depended on aerial lidar acquisition to see what the human-eye cannot. This work includes discovering a previously unknown burial mound at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harper’s Ferry, Iowa.

Aerial lidar enabled the team at Treblinka to highlight areas to dig test trenches. The lidar was able to give credible leads through showing depressions in the ground, as well as give enough information to get the approval to dig from the Treblinka’s protectors. Sure enough, the lidar paid off and the hidden ruins of the gas chambers were located.

The importance of this work isn’t quantifiable, but the technology that enabled the key discoveries is. Aerial lidar has consistently demonstrated a serious return on investment, especially when the resulting information has such lasting effect on the world. Plus, I get to watch smart people solve important mysteries using the same technology we do, and then remark from my couch how cool it is that “we do that too.”