The strange story of Sandy Island, the remote Pacific outcrop that never existed
There is – in a very real sense of the familiar phrase – nothing to see here
Sandy Island on a 1908 map
The RV Southern Surveyor was sailing through the sunlight of a warm summer day when Dr Maria Seton noticed that something was wrong.
November 22 2012 should have been an ordinary date in the diary for this doughty Australian research vessel, as it studied the lay-out of the seabed in the Coral Sea, some 900 miles east of mainland Queensland. But after a few minutes of confusion, the geologist on its deck realised that, somehow and somewhere, the ship had left the chart. Seton and her colleagues were travelling freely across a horizon-wide patch of open ocean. The trouble was, the map said otherwise. In its esteemed opinion, they had just washed ashore – onto an island the size of Manhattan.