ABSTRACT
In late March 2011, 72 sub-Saharan migrants left Tripoli on board a rubber dinghy in an attempt to reach the small Italian island of Lampedusa. After covering approximately half the distance, the boat ran out of fuel and started drifting in the open sea. What the author finally produced was a 73-page report that is currently being used for various legal actions, particularly for a complaint lodged in Paris regarding the non-assistance of people in danger at sea. In the absence of external witnesses, the team corroborated survivors' testimonies by interrogating the very environment where these events took place: the sea itself. One of the techniques, synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery, examines the sea as a two-dimensional plane. The beaming of electronic signals on the relatively flat and uniform surface of the sea allows vessels to produce returns that appear as pixels eight times brighter than the surrounding expanse.
