Day four

Day four is here, and with it comes one of the worst headaches of my life!

This post will probably be the shortest. The challenge itself was pretty easy, I did it all from my phone before dragging myself out of bed to write this (Which I enjoyed doing).

You’re not here to see me grovel and groan about how any source of light hurts my brain, onto the challenge!

Question one

79°44'8"N 10°59'21"E
These coordinates point to the location of a settlement that no longer exists. Its former name inspired the fictional town featured in a christmas film.

What is the name of the film and when was it released?

We don’t have to spend any time finding the exact location of a photo today. In fact, there is no photo. We have exact coordinates and some trivia on the location, then the question.

Let’s search for the coordinates:

I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on my phone so the above result was what I saw. When I did this same search through Google I didn’t get as much information. DDG gave us some key information in the identified location:

Nordvest-Spitsbergen National Park
Nordvest-Spitsbergen National Park is located on the Norwegian arctic archipelago of Svalbard and includes parts of north-west Spitsbergen and nearby islands such as Danes Island and Moffen. It contains, among other things, warm springs and remains of volcanoes in Bockfjorden.

The specific island where the coordinates lead us to is called Amsterdamøya, or Amsterdam Island for the non-Norwegians out there. Amsterdamøya has a wikipedia page which surprised me a bit. I’ve personally visited many islands in my home country that don’t have wikipedia entries. That’s the case in the southern hemisphere though. There’s plenty of history up north, and it’s the history of Amsterdamøya that’s important to us to find the answer to the question.

From the Wikipedia article:

Amsterdam Island was first seen by Willem Barents in 1596. The Dutch first occupied it in 1614 (the year in which it was probably named), building a temporary whaling station on the island’s southeastern promontory. In 1619 a semi-permanent station was constructed. It came to be called Smeerenburg (Dutch for “Blubber Town”). The settlement went into decline in the 1640s, and was abandoned sometime before 1660.

Interesting note that this whole section on Wikipedia has zero references. The whole article only has three references, all for the name ‘Amsterdam Island’.

More importantly we have another link to follow now - The town of Smeerenburg

Scrolling down a little bit to the Myth section gives us the answer:

The 2019 animated film Klaus takes place in the town of “Smeerensburg”, on a distant northern Scandinavian island, an intentional misspelling, according to producer Sergio Pablos.

No references for that, but it works as the answer!

We could have found the answer like that. Or we could have found it the way I did from my phone in bed (With the brightness all the way down so my brain didn’t hurt).

When I searched for the coordinates on my phone I saw that they were loosely located in the archipelago of Svalbard. I did a quick search for ‘Svalbard christmas movie’ and came across this:

But that wouldn’t have been as fun to write about.

Conclusion

Not much of a conclusion to write here. There are always ways to tackle an OSINT investigation. Calling this challenge an ‘investigation’ is a stretch but there will always be alternative routes to go down.

I’m off to sleep this headache off. See you tomorrow!