Sandy island, (new caledonia, coral sea).
This island had been listed in maps from the 18th century , and had also been shown in google maps, but suddenly the island dissapear, an explorer went in search of the island but he didnt find it now, nor beneath the sea even.
Scientist are stil trying to find an answer.

is that one of those islands that can only be seen every 10 years or something ?

it was never there

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2013/04/17/sandy-island-the-island-that-never-was/

Wikipedia

Sandy Island, New Caledonia
Sandy Island
Île de Sable

Landsat satellite image showing the island's supposed location.

Geography
Coordinates 19.22°S 159.93°E
Length 24 km (14.9 mi)
Width 5 km (3.1 mi)
Country
France (New Caledonia)
Demographics
Population 0
Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in French: Île de Sable, and in Spanish: Isla Arenosa) is a non-existent island that was charted for over a century as being located near the French territory of New Caledonia between the Chesterfield Islands and Nereus Reef in the eastern Coral Sea.[1] The island was included on many maps and nautical charts from as early as the late 19th century, and gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the R/V Southern Surveyor, an Australian surveyor ship, passed through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including those of the National Geographic Society and Google Maps.[2]

History

"Undiscovery"

As noted above, French hydrographical charts removed the island starting in 1979. Public claims that the island did not exist began in April 2000 by amateur radio enthusiasts on a DX-pedition.[10][11] They noted that it was shown on some maps, but not on others such as the 1999 Times Atlas of the World, 10th Edition.[11] A discovery of the island's absence was again made on 22 November 2012 by Australian scientists aboard the R/V Southern Surveyor studying plate tectonics in the area. During the voyage, they noticed a discrepancy between different maps and decided to sail to the supposed location to investigate. The crew found no island and recorded depths never less than 1,300 metres (4,300 ft).[1][12][13] They found that "the ocean floor actually didn't ever get shallower than 1,300 meters below the wave base…"[14]

The status of the purported island also became the subject of discussion on scientific mailing lists such as GMT-HELP in late November 2012.[15] Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 meter over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land. However, it became apparent that a land mask was applied to these data sets during pre-processing to differentiate between land and water. Since the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS) has become the standard global coastline data set used by the scientific community, errors that existed in WVS propagated into data sets that use a land mask. Therefore, rather than providing independent evidence for the existence of an island, the appearance of Sandy Island in bathymetry and satellite imagery data sets originated from spurious digitized geometries derived from the WVS database.[9]

The Australian Hydrographic Service, a department of the Royal Australian Navy, said that mapping an island as a copyright trap—a practice in cartography to place a fictitious "trap street" on a map for the purpose of trapping potential copyright violators—would not have been standard practice with nautical charts, and that its appearance on many contemporary maps may have simply been (and partly were) due to human error.[1]

The island was displayed on the Google Maps internet mapping service until 26 November 2012,[16][13] when it was removed. On Google Earth's default view the island area is covered by black pixels, but the program's historical imagery feature displays a satellite image of the southern portion taken by DigitalGlobe on 3 March 2009, showing a darkened sea. On 29 November 2012, the National Geographic Society announced that it was officially striking Sandy Island from its maps. "The Geographer" at National Geographic, Juan Valdes, said, "full evidence has finally been presented. 'Sandy Island' has now been officially stricken from all National Geographic map products".

ow a Fake Island Landed on Google Earth
by Megan Gannon, News Editor
Date: 17 April 2013 Time: 05:52 PM ET


A view on Google Earth of the phantom Sandy Island.
CREDIT: via Google Earth
Last year, a group of Australian researchers "undiscovered" an island the size of Manhattan in the South Pacific.
A mysterious place called Sandy Island had popped up on maps, northwest of New Caledonia. It even showed up as a black polygon on Google Earth. But when scientists sailed there last November, they found open water instead of solid ground.
In an obituary for the island published this month, the researchers explained why the phantom landmass had been included on some maps for more than a century, pointing to some human errors and a possible pumice raft. [See Photos of a Giant Pumice Raft]

Sandy Island was first recorded by the whaling ship Velocity in 1876 and first mentioned on a British Admiralty chart in 1908. But future expeditions failed to find the island, and it was removed from some official hydrographic charts by the 1970s.
However, the errant island stuck on some maps and then crept into digital databases like the widely used World Vector Shoreline Database, which was developed by the U.S. military.
"During the conversion from hard-copy charts to digital formats the 'Sandy Island' error was entrenched," said Maria Seton, of the University of Sydney. (Seton was chief scientist on an expedition to study plate tectonics on the RV Southern Surveyor when the "undiscovery" was made.)
"We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed through the island," Steven Micklethwaite, a scientist at the University of Western Australia who was on the voyage, told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time of the undiscovery. "Then we started compiling information about the seafloor, which we will send to the relevant authorities so that we can change the world map."
Taken in the afternoon on July 19, 2012, this NASA MODIS image reveals the Havre Seamount eruption, including the gray pumice, ash-stained water and the volcanic plume.

But what did the crew of the Velocity see in the first place that led to the false discovery of Sandy Island in the 19th century? Seton and her colleagues speculate that it might have been a giant pumice raft.
Pumice forms when volcanic lava cools quickly, trapping gas inside and creating lightweight rocks that can float. Last summer, an erupting undersea volcano called the Havre Seamount sent pumice drifting off the coast of New Zealand across an astounding area of 8,500 square miles (22,000 square kilometers). And Sandy Island happens to sit along a pumice "superhighway."
"It is believed that wind and ocean surface currents in the area combine to funnel pumice rafts through the area between Fiji and New Caledonia on their way to Australia," Seton and her colleagues wrote in an article in the journal EOS. "The formation of this 'pumice raft superhighway,' which passes by the location of Sandy Island, lends weight to the idea that the Velocity may have captured a moment when some sea‐rafted pumice was traversing the area." LiveScience.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientist-unravels-mystery-of-coral-seas-ghostly-sandy-island/2013/04/14/76316606-a508-11e2-8302-3c7e0ea97057_story.html

Scientist unravels mystery of Coral Sea's ghostly Sandy Island

A research ship cruised through the Coral Sea, east of Australia, bearing down on Sandy Island. The digital scientific databases used by the researchers showed the island to be 15 miles long, north to south, and about three miles wide. Manhattan-sized.

But when the ship reached the place where the island should have been, the researchers saw only open ocean. The water was nearly a mile deep. Sandy Island simply wasn't there. Or, it turned out, anywhere.

How could an island supposedly discovered in 1876, and appearing on many maps ever since, vanish? Did it sink beneath the waves like the mythical Atlantis? Or was it always a figment of some mariner's imagination?

The bizarre and complicated story of ghostly Sandy Island is a cautionary tale about what we know and don't know in the 21st century and how, even with satellite technology and modern surveying instruments, the ocean can still spring a surprise.

Last October, Maria Seton, a young scientist at the University of Sydney, led a 25-day expedition to the Coral Sea aboard the Australian national research vessel RV Southern Surveyor. The researchers wanted to understand the tectonic evolution of that corner of the Pacific. They gathered magnetic and gravity data to map the sea floor and collected rock samples from the bottom at depths up to two miles.

They noticed that multiple scientific data sets, including the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, showed Sandy Island clearly in a remote area west of New Caledonia. But the chart used by the ship's master indicated only open water. Seton and her fellow sailors realized something didn't add up.

We had a cached version of Google Earth for the area we had no Internet and saw that the island was depicted as a big black blob. This also made us very suspicious,she said.

Seton's 'undiscovery' of the island prompted a story in the Sydney Morning Herald that went viral. This was big news in the world of cartography; experts were puzzled, and some wondered if Sandy Island had been eroded away by the waves, like some ephemeral coral atolls. Google and National Geographic quickly removed Sandy Island from all of their maps.

Seton, meanwhile, dug into the mystery and has now published an obituary of Sandy Island in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Her research showed that the island appeared on the 1908 edition of a British admiralty map, which indicated that Sandy Island had been discovered in 1876 in French territorial waters by the whaling ship Velocity. The location and shape of the island on the 1908 map corresponds to what can be seen in the modern, erroneous databases.

The island was repeatedly 'undiscovered over ensuing decades, but it remained a shadowy presence in the cartographic world. Some maps labeled it ED,for existence doubtful. French hydrographic maps deleted Sandy Island once and for all in 1974.

But the island kept popping up in other places. The island was clearly marked, for example, on a 1982 U.S. Defense Mapping Agency map. Ile de Sable, it says, giving the French name. There's a cryptic annotation: Reported 1876. Reported to be about 4 miles east, 1968.

Seton's research pointed her to the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS), developed by the U.S. military. The database converted old, hard-copy charts to a digital format. But there were errors perhaps decades old lurking in the new data set.

nconsistencies in this data set exist in some of the least explored parts of our planet, a function of both human digitizing errors and errors in the original maps from which the digitizing took place, Seton wrote in EOS.

The errors then migrated to other databases used by scientists such as the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-Resolution Shoreline Database (GSHHS), Seton found.

Christine Phillips, spokeswoman for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the successor to the Defense Mapping Agency, said Sandy Island hasn't been on military maps for many years, though she was unable to specify when the island was removed from the charts.

Modern cartography is far removed from the era when maps went blank around the edges or carried the warning Here Be Dragons. But experts in cartography say that the craft is, like any other human endeavor, vulnerable to error. The more information we assemble about the world, the more opportunity we create for making a mistake.

Moreover, appearances can be deceiving: Just because a map looks professional, and just because a digital map may have impressive bells and whistles, doesn't mean that the underlying data has been scrubbed of errors, said David Titley, a retired rear admiral who served in the Navy for 32 years and served in the position of oceanographer and navigator.
When we look at these computer displays, with the three-dimensional imagery and colorized, it can give you a sense that we know more than we do, Titley said.A lot of people in the Navy don't always understand the difference between having a chart and having the survey data that formed that chart.

Another key lesson: Although the planet has been studied from space and, in some places, charted all the way to the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches, very little of it is surveyed to modern hydrographic international standards, said Phillips, the geospatial intelligence agency spokeswoman.

It's because of lingering uncertainties and misapprehensions that the U.S. Navy still has seven vessels that survey the oceans, Titley said.

Navigational errors can be catastrophic, as the crew of the nuclear attack submarine USS San Francisco discovered on Jan. 8, 2005. The submarine was cruising at full speed, more than 500 feet below the sea near Guam, when it slammed into an underwater mountain. Many sailors were injured, and one died later. The submarine nearly sank. Repairs cost millions of dollars.

The place where the seamount was located was marked on one map with nothing more than discolored water, Titley said. The Navy, alarmed by the accident, realized that it had a mapping problem and set out to correct the errors.

We would find these underwater features, these underwater seamounts. They either were simply not on a chart or were misplaced by several nautical miles. Or were a significantly different depth than what had been charted, Titley said. It's a really big ocean, and we certainly don't know everything.

But back to the central mystery of how Sandy Island came into being. Was it merely imagined? Maybe not. It's possible that what the whaling vessel saw in 1876 was a floating raft of stone a pumice raft.

Pumice is a frothy, light rock produced in volcanic eruptions. Huge mats of pumice can float on the ocean before eventually breaking to pieces.

In volcanic terrains you can get islands that are temporarily there and then disappear. I have seen floating mats of pumice that form and drift around for several years after a marine volcanic eruption, said Bruce Molnia, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

In her EOS article, Seton notes that an eruption near Tonga in 2001-2002 produced a pumice raft that traveled about 2,000 miles toward Australia, and it passed within 13 miles of the location of Sandy Island, the island that never was.

no, none of those. Watch the new show on the channel discovery scince (space month)

rind , do you have a name for the show
nothing popped up on searching for "sandy island"

inboxed you.

ty ty