Island found to not exist in the South Pacific

[bhonda]

[bbc.co.uk ]

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

I'm confused. I understand that hand-drawn maps and charts could be wrong, but surely there's at least one satellite image that shows nothing but sea?

I also don't get how the Google maps satellite image appears to have a black mark over the island. Was the island manually added to the satellite image?

Maybe I'm missing something here (apart from an island).

[Marketing Guy]

Apparently it's black because Google stiches together areas identified as ocean or land from different image sources;

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[lucy24]

The earth doesn't have lines of latitude and longitude conveniently drawn on it. Bummer.

On my wall I have a photo map of Venice at a scale of-- they say-- 1:3623. I will take their word for it; it means that each of its 3-inch squares is about 300 yards. The fine print says the pictures were taken over a 3-hour period on one date in 1982.* Look closely and you can see the places where shadows-- and in some cases the buildings themselves-- don't line up perfectly. And I think we can stipulate that curvature isn't significant at that scale :)


* There's also some technicalia about what kind of camera was used. They didn't just go out there in a helicopter with a Nikon.

[Essex_boy]

Twilight zone, I think strikes.

[john5000]

all of life be in da twilight zone

the universe be aware of us as much as we be aware of it, well actually universe be more aware of us sometimes than we of it

the universe plays little games, keys suddenly missing, island suddenly missing, deja vu stuff, all of it... psychologists neurologists skeptics and the lot play everything off as chemicals mumbo jumbo physics human error or whatever, but nah man God keeps things squirrely so It has room to play around with us and wake us up to the knowing that we are It

just the universe saying to itself "hey dude, remember me"

[iamlost]

There actually was something there. It was a huge alien space craft and it's inadvertant exposure on photo maps was covered up by naming it an island. It has since left.

So very foo.

[Essex_boy]

I guess your right

[LifeinAsia]

Is/was the island called Atlantis by any chance?

[lucy24]

I was thinking Laputa, but I may have my sources garbled.

South Pacific would normally mean that its name is whatever religious holiday it was discovered* on. So St. someone-you've-never-heard-of. But I guess not, if it never really existed.


* "... I naturally passed through a great deal of new country, and discovered, as we white men say when we are pointed out some geographical feature by an Indian who has been familiar with it since childhood ..."
--author's introduction to The Barren Ground of Northern Canada (1917).

[engine]

I find it hard to believe, after all these years of ocean exploration, it has taken until now to discover it doesn't exist.

Perhaps a cartographer from 300 years ago dropped a blob of ink on the map and the plagiarists have been at it since then.