The Mysterious Island that Doesn’t Exist

You can find Sandy Island on a map. It has existed on well-known marine charts and maps for more than a decade, and is even included in Google Maps and can be seen on Google Earth. But it actually doesn’t exist.

The mysterious island was believed to sit in the Coral Sea, somewhere between Australia and New Caledonia. But when a team of Australian scientists set off in that direction as part of their research on plate tectonics, they found just open water where the 26-kilometre-wide island was thought to be.

“We decided to actually sail through the island,” Dr. Steven Micklethwaite, one of the crew members on the expedition and a scientist from the University of Western Australia, told The Guardian. “Lo and behold there was nothing! The ocean floor didn’t ever get shallower than 1,300 metres below the wave-base. There’s an island in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t actually exist.”

The team also realized that the navigation charts on the ship didn’t include the island, while its weather maps did. And the French government, whose waters Sandy Island would fall under if it existed (New Caledonia is French territory), had no record of the island. But for the past 12 years, Sandy Island has been been included in the world coastline database, from which many maps are made.

No one knows how the error occurred, but Danny Dorling, president of the British Society of Cartographers, said it’s not hard for errors to make their way into maps. And it’s possible that Sandy Island really does exist, just somewhere else.

“It’s unlikely someone made this island up,” said Dorling. “It’s more likely that they found one and put it in the wrong location. I wouldn’t be surprised if the island does actually exist, somewhere nearby.”