Last November, an oddball news story caught attention around the world. A research vessel in the Coral Sea, northwest of Australia, discovered that a small island on the map didn’t actually, well,exist. It wasn’t a victim of sea level rise or a David Copperfield illusion—there just wasn’t anything there. A lot of the news coverage at the time was (quite appropriately) of the “Gee—whaddya know?” variety, but the researchers who “undiscovered” (de-scovered?) Sandy Island recently published a paper in Eos detailing answers to deeper questions—how did the island get on the map in the first place and what can we learn from its undiscovery?
via Ars Technica
Image: Sabin Zahirovic
