Last November, scientists travelled all the way to the South Pacific, just northwest of New Caledonia in order to at last check out Sandy Island. The island, which had for some time shown up on Google Earth as a black polygon shape, posed one problem when the intrepid travellers finally arrived at the mapped location: it wasn't actually there.
For whatever reason, Sandy Island never actually existed, scientists found, forcing them to literally "undiscover" the landmass that was supposedly the size of Manhattan, before being totally debunked by those who actually tried to find it.
According to LiveScience, Sandy Island — which also showed up on other maps for more than 100 years — had its "official" obituary published this month.
Reasons for Sandy Island having popped up on such maps and Google Earth — despite being only a vacant section of ocean water — include "human error" and the possibility of a "pumice raft" having appeared at the location at one point.
"Sandy Island was first recorded by the whaling ship Velocity in 1876 and first mentioned on a British Admiralty chart in 1908," LiveScience says. "But future expeditions failed to find the island, and it was removed from some official hydrographic charts by the 1970s."
The problem is that somehow Sandy Island "crept back" onto digital databases at one point, including the U.S. military's own World Vector Shoreline Database, which has become a widely used source for navigation.
"During the conversion from hard-copy charts to digital formats the 'Sandy Island' error was entrenched," said Maria Seton of the University of Sydney.
"We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island," University of Western Australia's Steven Micklethwaite, a scientist who was on the voyage, told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Then we started compiling information about the seafloor, which we will send to the relevant authorities so that we can change the world map."
So how, then, did Sandy Island show up on maps to begin with?
"It is believed that wind and ocean surface currents in the area combine to funnel pumice rafts through the area between Fiji and New Caledonia on their way to Australia," Seton and her colleagues wrote in an article for the journal EOS. "The formation of this 'pumice raft superhighway,' which passes by the location of Sandy Island, lends weight to the idea that the Velocity may have captured a moment when some sea‐rafted pumice was traversing the area."
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