The British Royal Navy discovered that Henderson Island, an isolated and uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, had been misplaced on maps for 85 years. He reported that the island was one mile (about 1.6 km) south of where it was marked on nautical charts used by sailors since 1937.
Located far out of the Pacific Ocean, Henderson Island is 5,800 kilometers west of Chile and sadly has the title of “world’s most polluted island.” Henderson Island’s beaches are littered with man-made pollution, with an average of 270 objects hitting its shores each day.
The island’s position was incorrectly determined by HMS Spey, located in the area. HMS Spey is not a research vessel and is actually a river-class offshore patrol vessel. However, using radar and navigation data, it cross-referenced Henderson Island’s actual location and detected the error on existing maps. “In theory, the image returned by the radar should sit exactly on the asset on the map, in this case Henderson Island,” Lieutenant Michael Royle
says. “This also means that the island was drawn in the wrong location when the map was first created. Notes on the map say it was produced from aerial photographs in 1937, indicating that the aircraft that took the pictures made mistakes in navigational calculations.”
Henderson Island is a relatively small piece of land at just 37.3 square kilometers. But it is home to about 40 million pieces of plastic. Possibly as a result of incoming currents and its location in the middle of the Pacific, floating plastic is accumulating in the area at an astonishing rate.
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