A Reddit user has sparked an internet geospatial discussion this week by discovering what appears to be a black hole in the middle of the ocean. A user named kokoblocks, who came across this topographic quirk while diving pretty deep into Google Earth, posted a screenshot of the Pacific Ocean in the /r/GoogleMaps subreddit.
The confusing coral formation, known as Vostok Island, is an atoll in the Southern Line Islands off Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean. This uninhabited island is 640 kilometers from Tahiti and is home to only 0.3 square kilometers of land. It was discovered by Russian Antarctic explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who sailed in the Vostok ship in 1820. The island coveted for guano (the then lucrative waste dumps) was taken by the US under the 1856 Guano Act and later by Britain in 1873, but was never used.
Declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1979, the island now hosts the untouched native flora of all Line Islands as a part of Kiribati. This may explain why the island looks so strange on Google Earth, if you zoom in on the image of the island it looks almost censored with its skirts dark green while its main body is black. It’s also possible that this unusual effect is simply due to a low-resolution image of a dense forest, although satellite image sites sometimes block certain images in this way.
This second explanation seems much more plausible given the nature of the terrain, with beaches made of coral sand and rubble and no freshwater ponds on the mainland. The island is largely covered with Pisonia trees that grow up to 30 meters high, and these trees are so tightly packed that there is no room for other plants underneath. The color of the island can therefore reflect a fairly uniform cover of Pisonia treetops.
Far from being a “black hole” as some on Reddit describe it, this unusual piece of land is surprising, including a few slugs and frigates, sea terns, rats, skinks, and palm crabs, as well as green turtles that occasionally visit its beaches. It is home to a wide variety of fauna.
So, this island isn’t that unusual, but Reddit has some great alternative explanations.
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