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Sandy Island, the Undiscovered Country
Big Hairy Ian writes "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."
Putting non-existent features onto published maps to provide proof of future copyright infringement is a well-known practice, after all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumice_raft
If this is on navigational maps, it could be a serious safty issue - not in avoiding it, but if for example a ship in distress navigated to it verses a actual existing piece of land...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You mean any place they think (or want you to think) there are shoals, sand banks or small island groups. If Google doesn't correct this within a few days, I'll be surprised. As of now, there's a 15-mile long virtual island out there where ships have sailed and say there's no such thing.
S 19 13' E 156 56'
It's too late. The joy of Lost was the promise of a satisfactory conclusion to a coherent story arc. Now we know that there isn't one.
Oh please. There are plenty of good reasons to prefer OSM over Google Maps and other non-free maps and I am an active contributor myself. But using this case as an argument? No. I've seen plenty of phantom cities added to OSM, either by mistake or intentionally. My favorite was a road shaped like the Batman symbol somewhere in the mountains of Washington. In addition, OSM does import a whole bunch of data (from government sources etc.) and thus it's quite possible that they could replicate someone else's mistakes.