Comments on: Undiscovery

Undiscovery

notme — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:20:39 -0800

Sandy Island is in the Coral Sea, between New Calendonia and Australia, and is visible on Google maps. The only problem is it doesn't exist.

By: Bromius

Bromius — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:28:29 -0800

I blame the cloudmonster.

By: asnider

asnider — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:30:21 -0800

My first thought was that it was a copyright trap that somehow got propagated widely, but the article discounts that possibility. Interesting.

By: mhoye

mhoye — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:33:49 -0800

the article discounts that possibility. It doesn't - it just suggests that doing so is unusual for nautical charts; it's interesting that it may be possible to trace that information back, though, to its original falsifier.

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:36:46 -0800

I bet that's what happened to Atlantis, too.

By: Smart Dalek

Smart Dalek — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:36:52 -0800

Goodnight, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel - wherever you are.

By: oulipian

oulipian — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:39:54 -0800

This is obviously viral marketing for DC's inevitable Aquaman trilogy.

By: griphus

griphus — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:44:16 -0800

"'The world is a constantly changing place, and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour,' Mr Naghdy said." Bullshit. That's the worst excuse for esquivalience I've ever heard.

By: mhoye

mhoye — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:46:31 -0800

That's the worst excuse for esquivalience I've ever heard. OK, that deserves some applause.

By: tommasz

tommasz — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:50:48 -0800

That's exactly what They want you to believe.

By: StickyCarpet

StickyCarpet — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:55:53 -0800

Google Streetview.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:59:42 -0800

Stranded at the drive in Branded a fool What will they say Monday at school? Sandy, can't you see I'm in misery? You made a start, now we're apart There's nothing left for me Love has flown all alone I sit and wonder why, oh? Why you left me, oh Sandy Oh Sandy, baby, someday When high school is done Somehow, someway Our two worlds will be one In Heaven forever And ever we will be Oh please, say you'll stay Oh Sandy Sandy my darlin', you hurt me real bad You know it's true But baby you gotta believe me when I say I'm helpless without you Love has flown all alone I sit I wonder why Why you left me, oh Sandy?

By: GenjiandProust

GenjiandProust — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:04:17 -0800

To be fair, hideous ruined cities rise and sink in that part of the world with a distressing regularity. Usually they are know by slightly more outre names, but I suppose, though the great turning of cosmic orthography, any one might become known as "Sandy." Perhaps the next time it lurches to the surface, we may have cause to regret this jesting.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:14:49 -0800

I'm totally sure that a dissapearing island and the, oh of course it's true and not planted by The Powers That Be at all, story that the 'Bloop' is harmless are not connected in any way... Cthulhu fhtagn!

By: sammyo

sammyo — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:19:56 -0800

Take out any of your nautical charts and actually read the fine print, many of the soundings are from decades or even centuries ago. Now here's a barren strip of land in the middle of nowhere, if you are not a survey vessel you'll chart your course to stay well off, never seeing anything and being quite content to have avoided a navigation hazard. So someone made a mistake that was propagated repeatedly. Or, it's the actual submerged location of the massive hydraulically activated super secret location of the sinking headquarters of the Illuminati!

By: qxntpqbbbqxl

qxntpqbbbqxl — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:31:15 -0800

None of this explains why "Sandy Island" is a scribbled-out blob on Google's satellite imagery. Somebody did that intentionally... but why? What possible use could there be for an imaginary island?

By: oulipian

oulipian — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:31:35 -0800

First they came for Pluto, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a resonant trans-Neptunian object...

By: coust

coust — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:38:46 -0800

That's right out of LOST....

By: asnider

asnider — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:43:02 -0800

It doesn't - it just suggests that doing so is unusual for nautical charts. True enough, but from the phrasing in the article I assume that it is very unlikely to be the case since this is not common practice for nautical charts. However, since the island apparently only started showing up on charts in about 2000, maybe it is a copyright trap created by someone who is less familiar with the conventions of nautical cartography?

By: agentofselection

agentofselection — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:45:28 -0800

Just throwing a guess out about the "satellite" function on google maps but the thing is, you're not seeing imagery of the surrounding area, you're seeing bathymetry. Their mapping software is probably set not to display bathymetry inside "coastlines", and instead to display whatever their best aerial imagery is. Nobody has ever taken aerial imagery of that blank spot of ocean, so you get black.

By: dominik

dominik — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:58:02 -0800

I'm so tempted to upload random beach photos to Flickr and Panoramio and geotag them in a way that they appear to be from that island.

By: pla

pla — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:11:25 -0800

agentofselection : Their mapping software is probably set not to display bathymetry inside "coastlines", and instead to display whatever their best aerial imagery is. Nobody has ever taken aerial imagery of that blank spot of ocean, so you get black. That explains the "island"-proper (which looks bizarrely redacted in the satellite view), but not the coastal shallows surrounding the black area. Then again, with Google it wouldn't surprise me if it annoyed them so much that their data didn't match reality that they photoshopped reality to match the maps. :)

By: MuffinMan

MuffinMan — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:18:58 -0800

I suspect this is, in fact, the lair of the next Bond villain, who has fiendishly plotted to make his dastardly tropical headquarters impossible to find. His next move will be to erase New Zealand and to see if anybody notices. He must be karate chopped and fed to a vicious shoal of giant squid immediately.

By: angerbot

angerbot — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:25:45 -0800

Sure it doesn't exist. And no secret facilities don't exist on it either.

By: Kid Charlemagne

Kid Charlemagne — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:42:12 -0800

Here's some cold hard idle speculation for you - "Sandy Island" sounds remarkably like the cheesy names of the countries the military is preparing to attack in training exercise these days (in lieu of doing something like War Plan Red where we practice attacking our bestest ally ever and then giggling about it during NATO meetings). Plus moving ships around an "island" that is actually deep ocean means no chance of running into things that are not ocean at cruising speed when your charts and reality don't quite line up.

By: Pastor of Muppets

Pastor of Muppets — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:42:49 -0800

It cannot be found by those who already know where it is.

By: localroger

localroger — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 10:11:03 -0800

Elugelab is another island that isn't there any more. Coincidence? I think not.

By: localroger

localroger — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 10:28:35 -0800

There is more weirdness in Google's map of the Coral Sea. Most of the depth data Google uses came from satellite surveys which approximate the depth of the ocean by exactly measuring the sea height; the local deformation of the geoid can be used to estimate how much of what lies beneath is lighter water rather than heavier rock. That's why it's fairly smooth; this is not a very high-resolution technique, but there is nearly global coverage. If you look just north of Sandy Island you'll see a little strip of higher resolution bottom imagery, which probably represents sounding data from a research vessel. If you look around you can find more of these. But just to the left/west, there are several irregular areas which look like they might be seamount plateaus which are represented by satellite photography instead of depth data. They're shaped like an archipelago, but aren't islands; they are blue ocean surface in the pictures and don't show on the map. And "Sandy Island" appears to be atop a seamount of similar appearance. It would be interesting to get the numerical depth data for that area, but I can't seem to find it online.

By: davejay

davejay — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:13:22 -0800

I would have found it much more interesting were it the opposite: an island not showing up on Google maps or other map sources, even satellite, despite it being present in the ocean, clearly visible to those traveling nearby.

By: Just this guy, y'know

Just this guy, y'know — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:50:39 -0800

There is a small island just north of Penang in the south China sea that appears on satellite view but not on a map. I was excited to discover this after I visited it.

By: Joe in Australia

Joe in Australia — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:52:37 -0800

There's a famous story (mostly told by Greeks and Israelis from what I can tell) about a similar mythical island, Malta, :

In any case, both gazoz and the kova tembel are now yok — itself a somewhat outdated Israeli slang term meaning "forget about it" that comes from the Turkish word for "there isn't any." And to say "Forgeddaboudit!" there is malta yok, an expression with an amusing history. In the year 1645, the story goes, the Ottoman sultan Ibrahim the Mad ordered his fleet to attack the Christian island of Malta in the western Mediterranean. Upon receiving the order, however, Ibrahim's chief admiral, fearing such a move would end in disaster, placed a candle on his naval map, allowed the wax drippings to fall on the little island until they covered it, declared to his adjutants "Malta yok," and sailed off to attack the Venetians in Crete. The siege of Crete lasted 24 years, in the third of which Ibrahim lost his head, and the Venetians finally surrendered in 1669.

By: destrius

destrius — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 21:46:22 -0800

I don't know why, but every time I look at satellite imagery of the middle of the ocean in Google Maps, I start to get this deep irrational fear welling up inside me. There's something about the infinite expanse of dark blue with the weird creases and protrusions... I sort of feel like as I browse this endless uninhabited seascape in my browser, I might suddenly chance upon some unspeakable horror lurking in the waves, unknown to all but the person who accidentally stumbled upon its image on their computer.

By: Pinback

Pinback — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:44:15 -0800

Ah, now I remember why this has been ringing bells for me all day: TXØDX Challenges National Geographic. I had in mind that at the time they'd gone looking & found it not there, but it seems they'd determined the island didn't exist beforehand, and checked out some other potential island reefs instead.

By: aqsakal

aqsakal — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 03:57:04 -0800

We've got one something like that in Italy, too. Now, if we could persuade the delightful Dr Seton to come and explore that one...

By: localroger

localroger — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:29:28 -0800

The recent article on Yahoo adds that the depth measured by the research vessel as it sailed through the "island" was over 4,000 feet. So no, it's not some kind of surface artifact. Still wondering what the deal is with the photo archipelago to the west on Google Maps.

By: Deathalicious

Deathalicious — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:57:32 -0800

"Sandy Island does exist - on a 1908 chart"

By: Chrysostom

Chrysostom — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:50:37 -0800

Kid Charlemagne: "(in lieu of doing something like War Plan Red where we practice attacking our bestest ally ever and then giggling about it during NATO meetings)" No love for Defence Scheme No. 1?

By: pla

pla — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:53:29 -0800

Deathalicious : Sandy Island does exist - on a 1908 chart Well then, that fits! Because, you know what happened in 1926-1927, right?

By: Chrysostom

Chrysostom — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 08:13:37 -0800

Excellent writeup at Strange Maps.