An island that was never there

[Glaurung]

A slightly old BBC news article. An island was shown on maps of the Pacific for at least ten years; then some scientists went there and found it was open ocean!

[comrade_general]

[Tom]

[Glaurung]

Or, for those who've read Tolkien's The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Fastitocalon.

[Jubal]

I quite like this one:



But yes, it's interesting. Was there just an especially dark patch of water there? Storm possibly blocking the camera's view, or a camera malfunction?

[Cuddly Khan]

There are a lot of blank places that can be seen all over Google maps, Google Earth, etc. Most of the time they're blocked out because the government doesn't want people looking at it. Maybe his is the same?

[Glaurung]

This seems to be a sort of anti-blank: Google and others put something on the map that wasn't actually there, and which contradicted the existing oceanographic charts.

I know the sort of thing you mean, though: the Ordnance Survey (the UK national mapping organisation) routinely had blank spaces on its maps where there were actually important military sites until the 1990s. One of them has a railway line ending in the middle of nowhere, where in fact there's a complex network.