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Ancient maps show islands that don't exist


Still Waters

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I do wonder if we can see the birth of islands why can't some disapper?  The earth's surface is always changing.

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Sounds like the story of Hy Brasil

Hy'Brasil - (The Lost Island)

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Hy'Brasil, also known as Hi-Brasil or several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.

Appearance on maps

Nautical charts identified an island called "Bracile" west of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean as far back as 1325, in a portolan chart by Angelino Dulcert. Later it appeared as Insula de Brasil in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), attached to one of the larger islands of a group of islands in the Atlantic. This was identified for a time with the modern island of Terceira in the Azores.

A Catalan chart of about 1480 labels two islands "Illa de brasil", one to the south west of Ireland (where the mythical place was supposed to be) and one south of "Illa verde" or Greenland.

On maps the island was shown as being circular, often with a central strait or river running east-west across its diameter. Despite the failure of attempts to find it, this appeared regularly on maps lying south west of Galway Bay until 1865, by which time it was called Brasil Rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

Ortelius_1572_Ireland_Map.jpg

Piri_Reis_map_of_Europe_and_the_Mediterr

Europe_Mediterranean_Catalan_Atlas.jpeg

 

Edited by EllJay
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4 hours ago, Still Waters said:

The treaty that drew the first borders of the newly established United States after the Revolutionary War refers to an island that does not exist. The northern boundary of the new nation, the 1783 Treaty of Paris declared, shall pass “through Lake Superior northward of the Isles Royal and Phelipeaux.” It sounds clear enough, but when surveyors went out to map the border in the 1820s they discovered a problem: Isle Phelipeaux was not there.

The long and fascinating history of such phantom islands is the topic of Malachy Tallack’s new book, The Un-Discovered Islands, which he discussed recently in an interview with National Geographic. Inspired by the book, we’ve rounded up a collection of vintage maps that feature islands that don’t actually exist.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/maps-undiscovered-fake-islands-cartography/

I wonder if some of these phantom islands once existed but are now under water and washed away by time.

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California was shown on many early maps to be a large island, off the West coast of North America.. This persisted until more thorough exploration and mapping showed this to be erroneous.

Francis Drake would presumably have thought of California as an island, when he claimed it for England in the 16th century. Even later English maps still show California surrounded by water.  Please see a link below to a collection of old maps, from various nations, depicting the 'Island of California': 

https://www.wired.com/2014/04/maps-california-island/

Edited by bison
corrected spelling, improved paragraph structure
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On the other side of the coin, Tasmania was thought to be part of the mainland rather than the island it actually is. 

As an aside, I think I once heard that cartographers would put in features (possibly islands) to catch out anyone copying their work. Certainly they get bored and put things in to take the mick. 

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/670-nil-how-to-hide-an-elephant-the-1923-gold-coast-survey

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9 hours ago, glorybebe said:

I do wonder if we can see the birth of islands why can't some disapper?  The earth's surface is always changing.

why not indeed. after 37 years maybe rising water levels might explain the "disappearance of Phelipeaux. or even receding levels made two islands one. 

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1 hour ago, Captain Risky said:

why not indeed. after 37 years maybe rising water levels might explain the "disappearance of Phelipeaux. or even receding levels made two islands one. 

Exactly.  There are so many changes the Earth goes through

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At least eight islands in the Pacific Ocean have disappeared entirely due to rising sea levels.

http://metro.co.uk/2017/09/10/eight-islands-in-the-pacific-ocean-have-disappeared-completely-due-to-rising-seas-6916697/

There are numerous reasons why these islands appear on ancient maps, one is the above, another is this

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There are a lot of theories as to what happened to the vanishing island of Bermeja. One idea is that rising sea levels or the effects of tectonic activity made it disappear beneath the waves. Another theory is that the cartographers who originally charted Bermeja simply made a mistake with the island’s location or even made up a phantom island with the intentional aim of confusing enemies

 

And again...we have more:

 

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it has been surmised that the mythical island of Antillia was perhaps merely a misidentification of the coast of Cuba.

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/06/mysterious-islands-that-vanished-without-a-trace/

The above link show numerous islands which have been charted  over the centuries. But today our technology is that advanced, that if an island is charted today, there will be no mistaking its location or any misidentification. 

We now understand and know that islands can disappear...and some reappear, because of our understanding behind it, this makes is less of a mystery as to what happened to those islands in the past and more of a learning kerb as to what we can expect in the future.

There are also conspiracy theories as to why islands have disappeared, 

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One of the more far out conspiracy theories is that the CIA purposefully had the island destroyed in order to remove Mexico’s claim on the many oil reserves of the Gulf and to increase the U.S. sovereignty on oil in the region and widen the United States economic zone here. 

Hopefully with our satelites and underwater technology,  these theories will be brushed away quicker than you can say " conspiracy theo....." 

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The long, thin island of Euboea, off the East coast of Greece has been known as a large island since antiquity. Yet lore and legend states that it was once attached to the mainland. An earthquake is supposed to have split it off from Greece in the dim recesses of the past. Not so unreasonable, considering the high level of seismic activity in Greece, and an earthquake fault in the appropriate area.

Ptolemy's famous map of the Mediterranean, from the the second century A.D. shows it as an island, as expected.  However, a later and more accurate map of the Mediterranean shows it connected to the mainland, at its northern end. This map is the Dulcert Portolano of 1339. Is this simply an error in the later map, despite its marked superiority to Ptolemy's map in almost every respect? 

It's been suggested that the Dulcert Portolano may have been based on maps older than Ptolemy's, which are now lost. If so, perhaps these source-maps came from a time before Euboea became an island. The Dulcet Portolano also seems to have other changed geographic features that might connect it to a time of great antiquity.

Please find a link to images of the Ptolemy Map and Dulcert Portolano compared together, below: 

http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/105nordenskiold.php  

 

Edited by bison
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