Pacific island does not exist

Sandy Island, a 20-mile strip of land in the Pacific between Australia and New Caledonia, easily found on Google Maps and many other charts, does not exist. The ocean at that point is in fact 4,620ft deep.

That's what they're saying, anyway.

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MORE: geography • Islands

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http://profiles.google.com/mkjonese Emma Jones

Could be someone put it on the map as an error to mark their work (this is a common practice), and people copied it.
- http://aniki21.blogspot.com/ Paul C
  
  The BBC article mentions this, but apparently they don’t do that with nautical maps because it would reduce their trustworthiness.
  
  Or so goes the official line… *narrows eyes suspiciously*
  - AlexG55
    
    There are subtler ways to introduce deliberate errors to nautical charts that (unlike fake islands) won’t affect navigation.
- http://www.fagerland.org tofagerl
  
  Wait, so you’re saying that Garminia isn’t a real continent…?
- Preston Sturges
  
  So you’re saying it’s a watermark?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Katrina-van-Malksvig/100000571611598 Katrina van Malksvig

20 miles long, eh? would make the ideal lair for an evil genius.
- Ipo
  
  That’s why we had it moved to an undisclosed location.
http://www.bytehead.org/blog/ Bryan “bytehead” Price

The satellite image is amazingly censored there.
- dragonfrog
  
  I was going to say – there can be cartographic errors, say where you switch to the satellite view and find that the river actually runs over there – but, an island that’s on the map, and blacked out in the satellite view, that doesn’t look accidental.
  - http://abrightcontainer.tumblr.com/ manybellsdown
    
    I’d bet there’s a bunch of artists and writers building a telepathic alien squid-beast for an evil genius there.
- bumblebeeeeeee
  
  Not censored, just no images. Same as all oceans, no company will waste money imaging nothing. Then Google wouldn’t waste time with nothing either.
  - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
    
    No, quite clearly Google has distant satellite photos of the oceans, but this island is blacked out.
    - bumblebeeeeeee
      
      it’s some-kind of image processing error caused by crossing incorrect geo data with the images.
      
      Google don’t censor images in this way. They use low res or limit zoom level (see any mil site), not redacting with black squares (i.e. drawing attention directly to it).
      - http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham
        
        Tell that to Yahoo. http://maps.yahoo.com/#lat=-19.497664168139046&lon=161.773681640625&zoom=8&mvt=s&trf=0
      - ocker3
        
        Uh, Google != Yahoo. Bumblebeee… Didn’t say map-making companies, he said Google
      - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
        
        Strange that both Google and Yahoo have obviously used different images for their maps, yet both have the ‘island’ blacked out. I really want to know what exactly is going on here.
      - imag
        
        Itsumishi – not only that, but they both have surrounding sea level data that shows a rise in sea level at that point. It seems odd that all that data was fabricated in two different maps with two different data sets.
http://www.genreville.com/ Josh Jasper

Well jeeze, not after Jack pulled out the stone plug and reset the Island.
- http://www.nogunarmy.com/ monstrinho
  
  came here to say that :D
kenmce

Mapping companies will sometimes put in a fake street so they can tell if someone else has stolen their work. Never saw a whole fake island before though. Hey, look in the close up, I see a guy running from some kind of giant white rolling ball-thing, maybe ***No Signal***
- citizen
  
  Be seeing you.
- dbergen
  
  Yup, the alley behind my house has a name on some maps, I asked the city about it and they said it was fake street data from one mapping company.
  
  Colin Yeung Alley my ass!
  - nixiebunny
    
    Same here. Akimbo Road was the name assigned to my alley. They also failed to indicate that it’s blocked to traffic in one direction.
  - TheOven
    
    Did you know this is actually a measure of copyright protection? Traps-Streets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
    - dbergen
      
      Just… wow….
- AlexG55
  
  One article about it said that nautical chart producers usually don’t insert fake features, as they want their charts to be considered trustworthy and also tend to be government monopolies.
  
  Also, there are more subtle ways to do it that are less likely to endanger navigation, like introducing deliberate errors in the final digits of extremely deep (>1000m) soundings.
Michael Rosefield

Sheesh man, it’s just a regular magical shrouded island, let it go people.
mortdieu

Maybe it only appears when the stars are right? In which case, I imagine the researchers should be very grateful indeed it had sunk again by the time they got there….
- Anon_Mahna
  
  ..it smelled of rotten fish and had a strange obelisk…….
http://twitter.com/snarf Snarf

Finally something Apples new ios maps app seems to get right!
- jetfx
  
  The error is repeated by Apple Maps as well.
  - http://twitter.com/snarf Snarf
    
    I couldn’t find it, but I forgot to check the satellite view.
pete_darby

I’m not saying R’lyeh… but R’lyeh.
- invictus
  
  Only 20 miles though? Hardly seems an appropriate domicile for an elder god.
  - https://www.facebook.com/rgovrebo B. Peasant
    
    It’s really much larger, but the non-Euclidean geometry doesn’t work well with our map projections.
    - invictus
      
      Except now I’m getting mental images of Lovecraft/Dr. Who crossovers.
      
      “R’lyeh is bigger on the inside.”
      - Lobster
        
        O R’LYEH?
      - invictus
        
        YA R’LYEH
      - http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline
        
        you are the best internet.
      - howaboutthisdangit
        
        BB needs an LOL button.
  - kenmce
    
    It’s just his pied-à-terre on Earth. Apparently the fishing is quite good out that way.
dougkaye

Just another victim of global warming.
- http://www.facebook.com/jrrennie Jake Rennie
  
  Yeah, I hate it when the polar ice melts to the point of sinking an island under 4620 feet of water. You’d think that with the ocean rising that high, you’d see the effects on other landmasses, but apparently not. That’s probably something for Al Gore to investigate in An Inconvenient Truth 2: Electric Boogaloo.
- http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline
  
  Yeah!, Thanks Obama D:
olrandir

On an entirely unrelated note, in “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft actually placed R’lyeh in the south Pacific. So, it might actually exist, but only when the stars are right!
- http://www.facebook.com/reverendjeffy Jeff Berg
  
  This is exactly what I was thinking. Maybe they last surveyed it when He was coming.
Ashen Victor

Maybe the BLOOP was really the island disappearing!!!
Wreckrob8

Has anybody counted them all? Maybe there’s a new one somewhere else.
sqyntz

It’d be freaky if a volcano erupts there next week…
Craig Kaplan

It isn’t there. It’s a black rock. Uninhabitable. Terraforming failed, or some such…
barrie

Nothing to see here (and certainly not a badly redacted French secret island laboratory in the south pacific .) Avancer, avancer …
blueelm

Kind of interesting then to me that if this thing has been on maps for a while no one yet thought to take a look at it before?
jetfx

As a cartographer, this is a really easy and common mistake to make. Once something like this gets into the data, it just gets repeated, and since there is nothing there of interest, no one goes out to check. While the world is technically all mapped, there are large parts of it that are mapped at very low ‘resolution’, because no one lives there, and there are no resource extraction operations there.
kiergsmith

Well, I just looked with Terra/Modis Rapid Response, and as of yesterday it’s not there.

Terra/Modis

Looks like yesterday was not a bad day around there. Maybe it’s time to spend my holidays searching for missing islands in the S. Pacific
http://excelsior-station.wikidot.com Sarge Misfit

Now where did I park my island …. ?
peregrinus

Someone tell me this isn’t where Amelia Earhart was headed.
RogerStrong

The presence of this island would have expanded any fishing and resources claims for France. Perhaps someone was careful not to remove the error.
- ocker3
  
  Which is one reason why Australia was checking on it
ObeyMyBrain

Sounds like the plot from a 70′s Bond movie.
http://twitter.com/nothingsmonstrd nothingsmonstered

Welcome to Leshp!
Jorpho

There is no Sandy Island. Sandy Island is named for its extensive, pristine white beaches. There are no beaches.
http://illustratorhints.com/ Jesseham

They may redact it from maps, but what they forgot to do so for images…
- blueelm
  
  Well… I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but there are several “sandy islands” out there. One is off the coast of South Carolina, for instance.
http://profile.yahoo.com/IYAQ2ZDYG3ESHWSO7LXYBKDEEU Nofare

My home country of New Caledonia mentioned on BoingBoing?! I can now die and swim back to Rlyeh in peace.
Fhtagn.
- http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios
  
  I have always had this odd fascination with countries like yours. It’s like there are certain spots on the planet that we in the States NEVER hear anything about. I mean you are all there, part of the Earth but for most Americans you might as well be orbiting Alpha Centauri.
  - Boundegar
    
    They really need to start a war or have an interesting disaster.
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/IYAQ2ZDYG3ESHWSO7LXYBKDEEU Nofare
      
      The US were very interested in us in another era, one of (surprise surprise) war; WWII that is. New Caledonia was one the largest US Navy bases then.
      So yeah, a war would put us on the map.
  - Preston Sturges
    
    You mean like “Canada?”
  - Antoine
    
    No wonder… New Caledonia is a part of France. For now at least!
freshyill

The island is there. It just isn’t there right *now*.

Has Lost taught us nothing, people?
- BillStewart2012
  
  It’s where Brigadoon goes when it’s not in Scotland.
http://echofox3.blogspot.com efergus3

And now all 73 of the former inhabitants are looking at each other and going: “Alright, who forgot to lock up when we went on vacation?” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island_(New_Caledonia)
voiceinthedistance

All this bad PR means the value of my Sandy Island timeshare just plummeted. My loss is your gain, though. Anybody want to trade two weeks there in December, in exchange for a long weekend in Jersey City sometime in February? Sandy Island is the ideal place to get away from it all.
mrtut

Is it located at 47°9′S 126°43′W , or is it at approximately 12°S 78°E ?
ntsteflonnts

As we all know, the island isn’t there because Juliette detonated the hydrogen bomb, causing an alternate timeline. That, and they’re all in heaven or purgatory, or something.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003066109688 Adrian Beauchamp

Could this be the secret headquarters of International Rescue? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Island
herke anderson

damn there goes the vacation again!
Philboyd Studge

It may be Brigadoon – I’m sure it will turn up in a bit.
bo1n6bo1n6

It’s a trap!
http://twitter.com/stuck411 David

When Merlin awakes from the Crystal Cave located there, the mists will disappear, the land will take corporeal form, and we’ll all know it to be the Isle of Avalon.
Preston Sturges

I wrote to Google last year because on the topo view in Google Maps they had mislabeled a small river and a number of streams in my old stomping grounds. They applied the same label to several of them. i got an acknowledgment email a couple months later.
- Luther Blissett
  
  Try MapMaker next time (if available in your country, that is).
  
  Took them a couple of hours (!WTF!?) to fix a misnomer of an island in the Indian Ocean for me. Which was also misnomed in several language versions of Wikipedia because of the interwebz recursion department of recursion.
  Wonder how long it will take to correct all the wiki pages…
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=508607337 Orion Starfire

So that’s what the island from Lost is called. Probably teleported away.
DJ Byzantine

Has anyone thought about the fact that there might have been an underground nuclear test there by the French???
http://profile.yahoo.com/RINQHAVVQ2YGNTC5QAB54LRQSI e

I’ll just leave this here – http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.8144
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003066109688 Adrian Beauchamp
  
  Before I was nostalgic, now I’m scared… this is all starting to come together like the loose threads of IP adresses in the browser cache of our collective memory…
http://capl.washjeff.edu/ capl

I’m surprised no one has brought up the theory that one of the scientists (Dr. Steven Micklethwaite) has, that the original source of their charts was a CIA map. Link with audio interview… http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/where-did-it-go-scientists-undiscover-pacific-island-20121122-29ro4.html
Luther Blissett

Nofare, If the price of Nickel is going to rise again like in 2007, you’ll be on MANY maps.

Just out of curiosity, do you have “domestic” mail service to France? One of the puzzling realizations of my early teens was when I grasped that France and Portugal really still had colonies. And that you could just travel there without any paperwork. (Except for the costs!) New Caledonia is on my list of “must see” places on this planet.
jhertzli

THEY are trying to hide something … like the presence of seven stranded castaways…