A team of explorers traveling to a remote island off the coast of Australia has made an unusual discovery. Or perhaps in this case, it is more accurate to say that they made an "un-discovery." It turns out the tiny piece of land known as Sandy Island doesn't actually exist despite the fact that it appears on nearly every map and atlas in the world.

The research ship RV Southern Surveyor was sailing in the South Pacific when the crew noticed an interesting discrepancy between their navigational maps and other atlases that were aboard. Almost every source they checked, including Google Maps, showed a small speck called Sandy Island halfway between Australia and New Caledonia. But the ship's navigational charts showed no such island, so the crew decided that while they were in the neighborhood they would go and investigate. What they discovered was nothing but empty ocean.

The Surveyor actually arrived at the site of Sandy Island in the middle of the night, which left some of the crew, including the captain, a bit concerned that they might run aground on a piece of land just beneath the surface. But their depth sounding equipment showed that the ocean floor was thousands of feet below. This indicated that the island wasn't a victim of recent volcanic activity and probably never existed in the first place.

Filed under: History, Learning, Oceania, Australia, News