Google Maps Has a Hole in the Ocean and Reddit Couldn’t Agree on What it Was
It isn’t one of Dune’s sand worms at least, they don’t do well in water
A Redditor playing around in Google Maps came across a mysterious black hole in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and no one can agree on what exactly it is.
Reddit user kokoblocks posted a photo of the mysterious anomaly in the Google Maps subreddit, asking the community “What the f— is that? This looks nothing like an island.”
Several users offered their suggestions, according to Insider, which ranged from tongue-in-cheek to genuine guesses.
“Obviously Hollow Earth entrance. Duh,” one user replied, referring to the Hollow Earth theory that says the Earth is, well, hollow.
Others took the opportunity to answer the original poster’s question by dropping some rather clever puns: “No it doesn’t. Not atoll.”
Others just felt like being cheeky: “It’s surrounded on three sides by water, making it a peninsula,” another user helpfully suggested.
Just what exactly the photo showed did get some actual good-faith answers though.
“Looks censored for some reason,” one user said with other users concurring. “My first thought was that it’s censored,” another user replied. “It wouldn’t make sense for a natural formation to be black like that in such a shallow, small atoll/island.”
Google Maps blurring out sensitive sites like military bases is pretty standard practice, and an island airbase in the pacific isn’t exactly unheard of.
Others looked for more natural explanations, including volcanic rock.
The black hole in the ocean actually does have an explanation, it’s the island of Vostok, a few hundred miles south of Hawai’i. The island only looks black from very high up, but zoom in, and things begin to clear up a bit.
“What you see as black is actually very dark green, it’s a very dense forest made up of Pisonia trees,” one Redditor explained.
While not as exciting as a doorway into the interior of the Earth, it was at least enough to keep some Redditors up late into the night.
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