Nice word - UNDISCOVER
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/where-did-it-go-scientists-undiscover-pacific-island-20121122-29ro4.html
Most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, but a team of Australian scientists have done the exact opposite.
They have found an island that doesn't exist.
Even onboard the ship, the weather maps the captain had showed an island in this location.
Dr Maria Seton, University of Sydney
The island, named Sandy Island on Google Earth, also exists on marine charts and world maps and allegedly sits between Australia and New Caledonia in the south Pacific.
The island that isn't ... how it is highlighted on a map
The island that isn't ... how it is highlighted on a map
But when the voyage's chief scientist, Maria Seton, and her crew sailed past where the island should be, they found nothing but blue ocean.
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"We became suspicious when the navigation charts used by the ship showed a depth of 1400 metres in an area where our scientific maps and Google Earth showed the existence of a large island," Dr Maria Seton, a geologist from the University of Sydney, said.
"Somehow this error has propagated through to the world coastline database from which a lot of maps are made."
Apple updates maps to remove Australia’s ghost-city in the desert
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/10/apple_maps_ghost_mildura/
As Apple pushes out an update to iOS 6 maps to remove the now-notorious “desert Mildura”, I’m going to sound an unusual note of fairness to Cupertino for the mistake.
It wasn’t actually Apple’s fault. It looked bad compared to Google Maps, because the Chocolate Factory has spent an awful lot of money, time and petrol on StreetView and other ways to improve the “ground truth” of its maps – but Apple hasn’t yet had the chance to correct the data it uses as inputs, to any great extent.
To be blunt, there is a place called Mildura whose location is given as exactly where Apple put it – at least, there is in an authoritative source for such a location.
The question that didn’t get asked in the midst of the game of laughing-and-pointing at Apple is “what was the data source”? It is not, after all, Apple, since it takes time to build one’s own maps, and even Google’s improvements to incoming map data are still only part of the story. Google Maps credits the local data sources it uses, down in the right-hand bottom corner, underneath a couple of dialogues that obscure the credits.
In this case, the Australian Gazetteer – the authoritative list of 300,000-plus placenames, complete with coordinates – includes two Milduras. One is the “real” town, the other is an entry for “Mildura Rural City”, coordinates -34.79724 141.76108. It’s this second entry that points to the middle of the Murray-Sunset National Park, just near a spot called Rocket Lake.