A Redditor playing around in Google Maps came across a mysterious black hole in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and no one can agree on what exactly it is. The uncanny, dark mass of an island on Google Earth made waves on social media as some users went wild with their imagination and suggested it was a “censored” destination.
Reddit user kokoblocks posted a photo of the mysterious anomaly in the Google Maps subreddit, asking the community “What the f— is that? This looks nothing like an island.”
Different people had different opinions about the true nature of the picture, which ranged from answers posted just for laughs to actual logical explanations. “Obviously Hollow Earth entrance. Duh,” one user replied, referring to the Hollow Earth theory that says the Earth is, well, hollow. “Looks censored for some reason,” one user said with other users concurring. “My first thought was that it’s censored,” another user replied. “It wouldn’t make sense for a natural formation to be black like that in such a shallow, small atoll/island.”
Google Maps is known for blurring out sensitive areas such as military bases and an island airbase in the Pacific Ocean wouldn’t be too surprising. Some people also suggested a natural explanation for the picture, including volcanic rock.
But in reality, the object was not a hole in the ocean but the 56-acre island of Vostok Island, which is an uninhabited island owned by the Republic of Kiribati.
The island, with the coordinates 10.06 ° S, 152.31°W, was first discovered by the decorated Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen in 1820, according to a Cambridge University publication. Von Bellingshausen name the island after his ship Vostok, which means East in Russian. That said, while geographical experts are yet to comment on the confusion surrounding Google Maps’ rendering of Vostok Island, this is barely the first time the company’s satellite imagery has sparked debate.
Source: AWM