What's inside this crater in Madagascar

diverse places in the world. Almost all of its plants and animals aren’t found anywhere else on Earth. And when we looked at it from space, we saw a spot. A massive dark circle, almost perfectly round, over thirteen kilometers in diameter, and big enough that roads are diverted on either side of it. Looking at it from the side, we could see it was a mountain. And if you zoomed all the way in, you could see a village nestled in the crater at its center. 8 kilometers from the closest labeled town on Google Maps. Isolated in a remote part of a remote region of a geographically isolated country. It looked like it could have been there for generations. But if you looked backward through time … … each year … … it gets smaller and smaller … … and before 2008, there was no one there at all. I wanted to try to answer one question: Why did these people move to such an incredibly isolated place? I was really starting from zero here. I didn't know anyone in Madagascar. I didn't know that much about Madagascar. But the question was: could we get in touch with the people living here just by using the internet? The closest location tags were on the edges of the mountain: a butcher shop, a playground, and a historical landmark. But none of them were real — they all seemed to be random references to the popular Japanese manga and anime series Attack on Titan, written in Russian. The ones that did look real — churches, hospitals, schools — didn’t have much of a presence on the internet. So we looked at content that had been geotagged nearby. First on Twitter: using the coordinates of the village, and a search radius. Until finally at 12 kilometers away … … we found someone. A nonprofit worker who had posted from a nearby village in 2014. We asked if he knew about the village on the mountain. But he never got back to us. On Instagram, we looked for pictures tagged in the nearest town, and found an aid organization that had posted pictures t