Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in
French , and in
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
) is a
non-existent island that was charted for over a century as being located near the French territory of
New Caledonia
)
, anthem = ""
, image_map = New Caledonia on the globe (small islands magnified) (Polynesia centered).svg
, map_alt = Location of New Caledonia
, map_caption = Location of New Caledonia
, mapsize = 290px
, subdivision_type = Sovereign st ...
between the
Chesterfield Islands
The Chesterfield Islands (''îles Chesterfield'' in French) are a French archipelago of New Caledonia located in the Coral Sea, northwest of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia. The archipelago is 120 km long and 70 km ...
and
Nereus Reef in the eastern
Coral Sea
The Coral Sea () is a marginal sea of the South Pacific off the northeast coast of Australia, and classified as an interim Australian bioregion. The Coral Sea extends down the Australian northeast coast. Most of it is protected by the Fre ...
.
The island was included on many maps and
nautical chart
A nautical chart is a graphic representation of a sea area and adjacent coastal regions. Depending on the scale of the chart, it may show depths of water and heights of land (topographic map), natural features of the seabed, details of the coa ...
s from as early as the late 19th century. It was removed from French hydrographic charts in 1974. The island gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the
R/V ''Southern Surveyor'', an Australian research ship, passed through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including those of the
National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society (NGS), headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational organizations in the world.
Founded in 1888, its interests include geography, archaeology, and ...
and
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
.
History
![Sandy Island on 1908 chart - cropped](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Sandy_Island_on_1908_chart_-_cropped.jpg)
On 14–15 September 1774, Captain
James Cook
James Cook (7 November 1728 Old Style date: 27 October – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean an ...
charted a "Sandy I." snaking between 19°–20° S latitudes and 163°50'–164°15' E longitude off the tip of New Caledonia. The associated map, titled "Chart of Discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean…", was published in 1776.
[See ]David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection is a large private map collection with over 150,000 maps and cartographic items. The collection was created by David Rumsey who, after making his fortune in real estate, focused initially on collecting ...
. The depiction is part of the existing Grand Terre reef encasing New Caledonia, with coordinates of the area generally true to within , despite Cook's use of
dead reckoning
In navigation, dead reckoning is the process of calculating current position of some moving object by using a previously determined position, or fix, and then incorporating estimates of speed, heading direction, and course over elapsed time. ...
.
[
]
The whaling ship ''Velocity'' reported the fictitious island in the year 1876, as was noted on various late-19th-century maps, including an 1881 German map and 1895 British Admiralty chart.
After returning from a voyage in the Pacific, the ''Velocity''s master reported two unusual features. The first was a series of "heavy breakers", the second some "Sandy Islets", or Sandy Island. Both then appeared in an Australian maritime directory for 1879. It noted the islets extended north and south "along the meridian 159° 57' E" and "between lat 19° 7' S and 19° 20' S". Until the appearance of "Sandy I." in 1876–79, the nearest charted land or reef was the
Chesterfield Islands
The Chesterfield Islands (''îles Chesterfield'' in French) are a French archipelago of New Caledonia located in the Coral Sea, northwest of Grande Terre, the main island of New Caledonia. The archipelago is 120 km long and 70 km ...
westwards on the Bellona Plateau. At the time when the chart was created, it was standard practice for all potential navigation hazards to be listed on such charts as a precaution.
Whether the fictitious Sandy Island was intended to be a correction to the position of Cook's islands of the same name is not clear. While at about the same latitudes, Cook's real "Sandy I." was four degrees of longitude—hundreds of miles—further east than the 160° E that became the usual location of the fictitious Sandy Island on later charts and maps that were drafted after the development of the marine chronometer and accurate longitude reckoning.
Hydrographic charts later placed the internationally recognized abbreviation "ED" ("existence doubtful") next to Sandy Island, in recognition of subsequent failures to spot the reported island at the expected location. Seafloor mapping in the area by the
Australian Hydrographic Service
The Australian Hydrographic Service (formerly known as the Royal Australian Navy Hydrographic Service) is the Australian Commonwealth Government agency responsible for providing hydrographic services that meet Australia's obligations under the SO ...
(AHS) determined a minimum depth for the immediate area around and over the island ranging from below
sea level
Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised g ...
. Due to a lack of appearance of an island or depths indicating a shallow reef, Sandy Island was removed from the official French hydrographic charts by the
French Hydrographic Service in 1974 after a flying recognition campaign and by AHS in 1985.
The information about the status of the phantom island was passed on to other national hydrographic services around the world, but Sandy Island remained in global coastline and bathymetry compilations used by the scientific community and was still there when the
RV ''Southern Surveyor'' sailed toward the Coral Sea in October 2012. The erroneously reported island persisted because it was included in the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS), a data set originally developed by the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (now the
National Geospatial‐Intelligence Agency
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a combat support agency within the United States Department of Defense whose primary mission is collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) in support of national ...
, NGA) during the conversion from physical charts to digital formats, and now used as a standard global coastline data set. Inconsistencies in this data set exist in some of the least explored parts of Earth, due to human digitizing errors and errors in original maps from which the digitizing took place. One of the most commonly used derived products of WVS is the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Geography Database (
GSHHG
GSHHG (Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database; formerly ''Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Database'' (''GSHHS'')) is a high-resolution shoreline data set amalgamated from two data ba ...
), which is ported with
Generic Mapping Tools
Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) are an open-source collection of computer software tools for processing and displaying xy and xyz datasets, including rasterisation, filtering and other image processing operations, and various kinds of map projections ...
(GMT) software. Although it is now an independent data set, an error in the original WVS data would have been present in this data set.
Pumice sea rafts
The ''Velocity'' may have observed
pumice sea rafts (masses of floating
pumice
Pumice (), called pumicite in its powdered or dust form, is a volcanic rock that consists of highly vesicular rough-textured volcanic glass, which may or may not contain crystals. It is typically light-colored. Scoria is another vesicular vol ...
ejected from an underwater volcano) traversing the Sandy Island area in 1876 and mistakenly recorded them as an island.
This explanation is supported by a 2004 study of an eruption of a volcano near
Tonga
Tonga (, ; ), officially the Kingdom of Tonga ( to, Puleʻanga Fakatuʻi ʻo Tonga), is a Polynesian country and archipelago. The country has 171 islands – of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in ...
that found that pumice sea rafts associated with that eruption traveled more than 3000 kilometers westward. An analysis of the pumice trajectory revealed that pumice rafts passed within 20 kilometers of the location of Sandy Island, approximately 200 days after the initial eruption. A study of coral migration from Tonga to the
Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over over an area of approximately . The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, ...
found pumice rafts to be the mode of transportation, with a predicted path consistent with the 2004 study. Wind and ocean surface currents in the area may combine to funnel pumice rafts through the area between
Fiji
Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists ...
and New Caledonia on their way to Australia.
"Undiscovery"
As noted above, the French
Naval and Oceanographic Service removed the island on its nautical charts in 1974. Public claims that the island did not exist began in April 2000 by
amateur radio
Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency communic ...
enthusiasts on a
DX-pedition
A DX-pedition is an expedition to what is considered an exotic place by amateur radio operators and DX listeners, typically because of its remoteness, access restrictions, or simply because there are very few radio amateurs active from that pl ...
.
They noted that it was shown on some maps, but not on others such as the 1999 ''
Times Atlas of the World
''The Times Atlas of the World'', rebranded ''The Times Atlas of the World: Comprehensive Edition'' in its 11th edition and ''The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World'' from its 12th edition, is a world atlas currently published by HarperCol ...
'', 10th Edition.
A discovery of the island's absence was again made on 22 November 2012 by Australian scientists aboard the
R/V ''Southern Surveyor'' studying
plate tectonics
Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large ...
in the area. During the voyage, they noticed a discrepancy between different maps and decided to sail to the supposed location to investigate. The crew found no island; depths recorded were never less than .
They found that "the ocean floor actually didn't ever get shallower than 1,300 meters below the wave base".
The status of the purported island also became the subject of discussion on scientific mailing lists such as GMT-HELP in late November 2012.
Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist, since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the
General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans
The General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) is a publicly available bathymetric chart of the world's oceans. The project was conceived with the aim of preparing a global series of charts showing the general shape of the seafloor. Over the ...
, which reported an elevation of over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land. However, it became apparent that a land
mask
A mask is an object normally worn on the face, typically for protection, disguise, performance, or entertainment and often they have been employed for rituals and rights. Masks have been used since antiquity for both ceremonial and practic ...
was applied to these data sets during pre-processing to differentiate between land and water. Since the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS) has become the standard global coastline data set used by the scientific community, errors that existed in WVS propagated into data sets that use a land mask. Therefore, rather than providing independent evidence for the existence of an island, the appearance of Sandy Island in bathymetry and satellite imagery data sets originated from spurious digitized geometries derived from the WVS database.
The
Australian Hydrographic Service
The Australian Hydrographic Service (formerly known as the Royal Australian Navy Hydrographic Service) is the Australian Commonwealth Government agency responsible for providing hydrographic services that meet Australia's obligations under the SO ...
, a department of the
Royal Australian Navy
The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) is the principal naval force of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The professional head of the RAN is Chief of Navy (CN) Vice Admiral Mark Hammond AM, RAN. CN is also jointly responsible to the Minister of ...
, said that mapping an island as a
copyright trap
Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect entries in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias (including Wikipedia), maps, and directories. There are more specific terms for particular kinds of fictitious entry, such as Moun ...
—a practice in
cartography
Cartography (; from grc, χάρτης , "papyrus, sheet of paper, map"; and , "write") is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an im ...
to place a fictitious "
trap street
In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential plagiarists of the map who, if caught, would be unable t ...
" on a map for the purpose of trapping potential copyright violators—would not have been standard practice with
nautical chart
A nautical chart is a graphic representation of a sea area and adjacent coastal regions. Depending on the scale of the chart, it may show depths of water and heights of land (topographic map), natural features of the seabed, details of the coa ...
s, and that its appearance on many contemporary maps may have simply been (and partly were) due to human error.
The island was displayed on the
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...
Internet mapping service until 26 November 2012,
when it was removed. On
Google Earth
Google Earth is a computer program that renders a 3D computer graphics, 3D representation of Earth based primarily on satellite imagery. The program maps the Earth by superimposition, superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and geog ...
's default view the island area is covered by black pixels, but the program's historical imagery feature displays a satellite image of the southern portion taken by
DigitalGlobe
DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at US ...
on 3 March 2009, showing a darkened sea. On 29 November 2012, the
National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society (NGS), headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States, is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational organizations in the world.
Founded in 1888, its interests include geography, archaeology, and ...
announced that it was officially striking Sandy Island from its maps. "The Geographer" at ''National Geographic'', Juan Valdes, said, "full evidence has finally been presented. 'Sandy Island' has now been officially stricken from all National Geographic map products".
See also
*
Dougherty Island
Dougherty is the name of a phantom island that was believed to be located in the extreme south of the Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between Cape Horn and New Zealand. It is named for Captain Dougherty of the ''James Stewart'', an English whaler, ...
, a phantom island that remained on many maps until the early 20th century
*
Los Jardines
Los Jardines or Los Buenos Jardines (Spanish for "the good gardens") are phantom islands supposedly located northeast of the Mariana Islands.
The islands were reportedly visited by Spanish explorers Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón (who named them ...
, also known as Los Buenos Jardines, a group of phantom islands first reported in 1529 off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea
References
External links
A full satellite image of the area by DigitalGlobeNo Land Ho: Sandy Island and the Age of Un-Discovery
{{authority control
Phantom islands
Islands of New Caledonia
Zealandia