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It's not explicitly stated but it seems that this island was not charted because the area it was in had previously been full of icebergs. > On the satellite images analysed, the island could hardly be distinguished from the numerous icebergs drifting around in the immediate vicinity due to its ice cover.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little cryptic, but I believe this passage "slightly longer than the Polarstern with its 118 metres and about twice as wide" tells us it's the size of two Polarsterns laid side by side. I still don't know what that is in terms of football fields, I assume you mean United States and not Canada, but maybe someone else can help out as I've gone as far as I can.
It's about a football field in both length and width. Little bit longer.
Valuable real-estate, it wont have any tariffs!
I assumed that satellite data would have been enough to know if something was an iceberg or land - wild that new land is still being discovered!
Appears that nobody ever ran a search. Probably because everyone just assumed there was no new land to discover.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appears that nobody ever ran a search. Probably because everyone just assumed there was no new land to discover.
The satellite data persumably also needs to be purchased, the area is huge, and this island is relatively tiny.
It's not explicitly stated but it seems that this island was not charted because the area it was in had previously been full of icebergs. > On the satellite images analysed, the island could hardly be distinguished from the numerous icebergs drifting around in the immediate vicinity due to its ice cover.
I was in the Antarctic about a decade ago, and this was underscored for me when we went to visit an island which has had maybe 20 humans visit, total - only to find it wasn’t where any of the charts said it was - it was about 3 miles away.
Fortunately we could just see it, as we had fine weather - which, upon further reading, neither of the previous surveys could, which explains the error - they had gone by dead reckoning in the era before GPS.
How much would an island like that set me back?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no interest in finding islands, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to find icebergs that never move.
reading this I was wondering about this. My sort of childlike mental model of satelite imagery of the planet is that we've "covered" everything but does anyone know at what frequency we do get new satelite imagery for places like the antarctic (or, say, the dead middle of the atlantic ocean?) I imagine that satelite imagery is a bit needs based but maybe every square meter of the earth is captured at least once a cou…
Probably, but likely not as thoroughly as you'd think.
The problem with most high-resolution imaging satellites is that they are not designed to work over the ocean. They can't track the Earth perfectly, so they use a lot of image processing to "unsmear" the images. These algorithms rely on tracking recognizable features moving across the frames. Which obviously fails with the ocean.
So you often get hilarious results with images of offshore drilling platforms or ships.
That being said, there are satellites specifically designed for ocean observation, so they likely won't miss something as big as a new island.