Jay Foreman

We don't know.

But the point is, maps were produced for hundreds of years that said, there is an island here, despite nobody ever checking.

And the incredible thing is, that phantom island lasted right up until the age of satellites, because Google Maps, despite

most people thinking that you take lots of satellite images you take photos of the world and then use that to draw the maps it's actually the other way around it's a lot quicker and cheaper and more accurate to take the map data that already exists and then paste your photos on top

And so because they did that, in the part of the Indian Ocean where they expected Sandy Island to be, there's a great big – well, up until 2012 when they got rid of it, there was a great big black smudge because that was where they told their computers, don't use plain blue for ocean.

Use actual satellite photo.

And so where the island should be is an actual satellite photo of the ocean, which in real life is a very, very dark blue that looks like a black smudge.

So yeah, this is a map era that lasted right up until 2012.

We're always keeping an eye on what's in the news with maps at the moment.

Any geography related news story is interesting to us.

And there was one that came up just less than a month ago where the African Union, which is a union of African countries, has put out a statement that they wish for most world maps to be changed because most world maps are using an old fashioned projection method, the Mercator projection.

which famously is accurate for shape but not very accurate for scale, takes the... So the problem is taking a round earth and making a flat map of it

is impossible to do without some kind of distortion.

You have to either stretch bits or squash bits or slice bits.

And the most popular method for doing it is the so-called Mercator projection, which sort of imagines that the globe is a balloon inside a tube.

You blow up the balloon inside the tube, and then when you deflate it, the ink has left behind where the countries are.

And the consequence of this is it makes all the regions near the poles, such as Greenland, enormous,

And that's at the expense of all the regions close to the equator which look much smaller than they are.

So on the most common seen flat map of the world, Greenland is about the same size as all of Africa.

And it also makes most of Northern Europe look bigger than it really is.