Or maybe it was that floating island in Dr Dolittle?

There is some weirdness going on in that part of the world. A Manhattan-sized island in the Coral Sea between New Caledonia and Australia seems to have vanished. It is supposedly at

19 13′ 06″ S
150 56′ 18″ E

But it is not shown on Google Earth, although it is obvious there used to be something mapped there at one time. Now there’s just a hole in the world.

This is either a copyright trap (a phony place inserted into a map to catch cribbers) or a scrivener’s error. I suspect the latter, there is a string of small islands exactly 1 degree of Longitude due W of that location, so it is probably just a gazeteer error that has been faithfully copied from one source to the other for years. One of those islets even appears to have an airstrip.

It appears to be the eroded flat top of the huge Bellona Plateau, capped by a few sparse islets with romantic names like Bampton, Renard, Avon, Minerva Shoal, and the South Bellona Reefs. Man, can you feel the adventure, the mystery of it all? When I was navigating the approaches to Midway Island, near Hawaii, I noted a name on the chart: “French Frigate Shoal”. There are still lonely places left on this crowded planet, there are still lots of “desert islands”, that have ben mapped, but no one lives there because there is no water. Google Earth is the place to go looking for them.

It may even go back to the mid-18th century, when ships could determine their latitude precisely from sextant observations, but only dead reckoning estimates could be made of longitude.

Astronomy catalogs are filled with mysterious objects like this: like “Baxendell’s Unphotographable Nebula”, observed visually by several reputable observers but never seen or photographed since. The catalog notes are filled with comments like “Smith saw an 8th magnitude star here in 1928, but modern photography shows nothing within a degree brighter than 12th magnitude”. Or, “a deep Harvard patrol plate from 1919 shows nothing at this location, but a 9th magnitude star is definitely at those coordinates today”. Other comments like “possible plate defect”, or “possibly mistaken for NGC 2151, 2 degrees to the North?, are common in the “notes” sections. Unless an observation can definitely be shown to be an error, the records are usually just asterisked. A lot of those mysterious observations may be clues to real phenomena, it would be a shame to throw that one data point away.

One of my professors spent his life looking for evidence of “Sam Brown”, a settlement that appears on Florida maps from the Seminole Wars up to the end of the 19th century. The trouble is it moves around. It has been mapped in the Panhandle, and in several places in South Florida. But other than a reference in several maps, and a few brief mentions in old records, it seems to have vanished without a place. (I meant to say “without a trace”, but I like the way that came out!)

I used to live near a place called Fort Lonesome, Fl. It is truly the back of beyond, just a road intersection, a ghost town, but its on the internet. Look it up.

A “12 inch variation event” is well within a tidal change in the open ocean.
I’m just guessing but I think the swings on the data charts are tides. Maybe someone else knows.

I don’t use the wordpress link button. Use html.

<a href=”URL”>Title< /a>

You MUST put the quotes around the URL

I’m going to try HTML again, still haven’t got the hang of it.