Thursday, November 22, 2012

They just discovered what really happened to Emilia Earhart

She was navigating with Google Maps:
A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.
The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.
But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.
Explains some of the directions I've gotten in the past, actually.  Still better than the iPhone mapping app, though.

4 comments:

wolfwalker said...

Heh.

There are many stories from olden days of phantom islands and bad marine maps, but I never thought it possible that one could still exist in this day of satellite scans and GPS.

Although I must point out, purely for fun, that Amelia Earhart vanished far north and east of 'Sandy Island.'

Anonymous said...

It is not entirely unlikely that this is a deliberate error. Putting obscure errors into maps (or dictionaries or other references works) is the traditional way to catch people who copy your work and claim it as their own.

BobG said...

R'Lyeh!

SiGraybeard said...

Anon 6:58 - good point. In the Digital age, many a piece of code in a ROM had a message that when properly decoded said who it was stolen from.