The island that did not exist

Who doesn’t dream of a deserted tropical island..sandy beaches made of coral sand, with crystal clear water, blue like the sky – you know what I mean. And let’s say it would be somewhere off the coast of Australia, maybe near New Calledonia. That sounds perfect.. it’s a great place, a great place to imagine.

Well, guess what: you’re not the only one who imagined it, exactly in the place I just mentioned…what a coincidence. Just that the person who imagined it went a step further – not only he/she drew it on the map, but he also put it on a map that got published. Why ? We might never know. Maybe that cartographer cared too much about that imaginary island that he/she thought it’s memory should be preserved.

Why do I say all this? Because at some point in the past months, a team of scientists surveying the area actually actually tried getting to this island, and low and behold: when their ship registered it was travelling above waters 1400 meters deep, the GPS placed their position right on top this beautiful island.

At that point, you can imagine what the capitain of the ship felt like – probably being the first capitain in some time to navigate right through an entire island. The ship, the RV Southern Surveyor, Australia’s Marine National Facility research vessel, was used in a 25-day research trip in the eastern Coral Sea.

“Somehow this error has propagated through to the world coastline database from which a lot of maps are made,” said the voyage’s chief scientist, Dr Maria Seton, a geologist at the University of Sydney. In fact, in the last decade or so, the missing island wasn’t really that anonymous – it had regularly appeared in scientific publications, “even on-board the ship, the weather maps the captain had showed an island in this location,” Dr Seton said.

The scientists were on a geological survey, studying and area that formed about 100 million years ago, when the Tasmanian sea opened, as Australia separated from the huge Gondwana super-continent, that also included Antarctica, India and Africa.

As Dr Seton put it, “this dispersed all the continental fragments in the area, which subsided and [went] below sea level. We went to find those fragments of our country“. The team managed to map more than 14,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor, gathered more than 6800 km of marine geophysical data, collected 197 rock samples, and of course, last but not least, “undiscovered” an imaginary island.

Nabil Naghdy, the product manager of Google Maps for Australia and New Zealand, said Google Earth consulted a variety of authoritative public and commercial data sources in building its maps: “the world is a constantly changing place, and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour’’ – that roughly means: there is still hope if you want to explore unknown places – there may be more imaginary places out there.

[Via Sydney Morning Herald]