About Time

For a better part of the last century, if you were to look at a map of the Coral Sea, you would notice just there midway between the coast of Australia and the French territory of New Caledonia, a small island.

Roughly the size of Manhattan, the island was on nautical charts, Google Earth, in nearly any atlas too.

Long ago, it was named Sandy Island, and that name stuck.

But in all the recent years it remained on the map, no one ever visited.

Not a human set foot on its beaches for that matter, and neither did any creature.

No birds, no rats, no crabs.

None could, in fact, because Sandy Island, well, it never existed.

Labeled Ile de Sable on French charts, its whereabouts were first recorded as early as the 19th century, and even after, it was faithfully reproduced on maps, databases, charts for the next hundred years or so.

You see, cartographers of the era would gather data not only from maps that came before but also from sailors and explorers.

It was impossible to produce a perfect map, and when one mistake was made and copied enough times, well, it became something of an inheritance to subsequent mapmakers.

And over generations, that small error became gospel.

It's not as if nobody ever noticed its absence or that it seemed to exist everywhere but in reality.

In fact, in 1974, the French Naval and Oceanographic Service removed the island from its own charts, but that change did not make its way onto other maps.

In April of 2000, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts were on a trip called DXpedition.

This is a sort of trip to distant locales to set up shortwave radios where there aren't any.

And on this particular trip, travelers noted that the island had appeared on some maps but not others.

And spoiler alert, they did not set up a radio there.

Even then, the island persisted on many maps, including those of Google, the National Geographic Society, even the CIA.

And then in November of 2012, a team of scientists from the University of Sydney were sailing the Coral Sea, conducting research on plate tectonics, when their instruments alerted them that there was land ahead.

But in the spot where the charts placed a 15-mile-long sandy beach, they found nothing but deep blue water.

Aboard the Southern Surveyor, this team measured depths of roughly 1,400 meters where the island should have been.

When they returned home and told the tale, the media jumped on the story, and cartographers everywhere rushed to correct the mistake.

Within days, the British Oceanographic Data Centre issued a rare statement that they were correcting their maps, and Google, Nat Geo, and others removed the phantom item from theirs.

It quickly became subject to fringe conspiracy theories too, but there it was.

Sandy Island had officially been undiscovered.