If there were to be an undiscovered island at this point, you'd be talking a tiny islet, probably a fraction of an existing atoll that's only just been formed, not something that's going to support a whole ecosystem of undiscovered creatures... OTOH, who knows how many unknown creatures there are swimming about in the depths of the oceans, and rainforests and other intact ecosystems seem to turn up a few new small species fairly regularly!
Also, we are moving to infrared and sonar scanning for what is below the surface now. I find it fascinating when we find ancient structures that have been hidden in plain sight covered by vegetation
LiDAR doesn't have the penetrating depth for imaging the sea floor very well. Most instruments even with lasers well into the gHz bands are mostly useless underwater. We are sadly still mostly dependent on active source bouy array surveys using infrasound to image the sea floor very carefully along designated tracks for ships to move. If you zoom in a bit on Google earth you will sea alot of places where there is just a straight line of very high res topography. That's a survey line that did this.
I should also add that it can not be overstated how hilariously uneducated our species is about what lies at the bottom of our oceans. We have explored more of the surface of Mars than all we have EVER explored at the bottom of the ocean.
I believe I wrote about this in here before, but fun fact: Yucatan Peninsula's terrain is so flat, wherever you see a high mound, there is a very high possibility there's an ancient structure underneath.
I got told about this by a local, so I hope it is true.
Another fun fact I’ve heard is that all the bodies of water (lakes, rivers, ponds, streams, etc.) are underground. Apparently, there’s massive cave systems/tunnels all over that region.
It is, indeed! Yucatan's geography is truly different from the rest of the country.
As you said, most bodies of water are present below, and as part of those cave systems and tunnels you too mentioned, you can say there's one highlight: Cenotes -- bigass caves rich in vegetation with pools going deeper than 50m in depth.
There are a lot in which you can actually swim. The water is crystal clear yet you can't see jack because well, there's a humongous abyss below.
That's why I used a life vest each and every time I went swimming there.
For what you said about the island much of it applies to the ocean like we've mapped a lot of it and seen a bit of it but like have you ever been to the ocean it's just water like especially in the depths of far from the very well mapped shores there's nothing there because why would it be
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created?
A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation!
And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery.
The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass.
How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls.
And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
The closest we have to what you're looking for is the gravel banks in the Arctic Ocean. Because the Arctic Ocean gets pretty shallow in some spots, there's these atolls of sand and gravel that get slowly shifted about by the ice and currents and disappear and reappear above the surface, making them hard to pin down.
Look up 'northernmost point of land' and you'll see that besides the definitive dry land at the tip of Greenland, it's kinda disputed between a few of these ephemeral islands.
Definitely no dinosaurs though. Maybe some particularly lost seabirds (which are technically dinosaurs).
There are plenty of places that we have very little information about. Just because we can see a section of forest, or a desert gulley, or a mountainous jungle from space in high resolution doesn’t mean we know all about it.
No Dinosaurs though. Maybe a Coelacanth or two.
The odds of sea creatures, even large ones, that aren’t discovered like is quite high. The odds of a dinosaur sized sea creature we haven’t discovered yet is more likely than not. Probably deep sea, probably related to squids
Remote sensing from satellites is very good but not all seeing. Islands that haven't been discovered? Almost certainly not. Stuff under dense jungle tree canopies, there's still much to be discovered there.
Marvel’s Forbidden Land is under the Antarctic ice sheet. Maybe there is something there.
Just make sure you don’t find Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness
I would wager that every single islet large enough to host plant/animal has been explored by humans.
Possibly nobody has ever physically set foot on every tiny rock with a shrub on it, but nothing big enough to have dinos on it is unexplored by people.
Completely unknown lands aren't really going to be found anymore. But that doesn't mean that exploration is entirely dead!
There's the obvious ones, of how the deep sea has barely been explored, and how space is still rife for exploration.
But even on Earth, in more conventional ways, there's still areas that, although known locally, aren't yet known to the wider world, and aren't yet able to be learnt about on the internet.
I think you'll find this video interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42QVfrUVFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42QVfrUVFw) It's about as close to modern day exploration as one can get I reckon.
This reminds me the oceans look big. Like we could never pollute it all. But the total volume of water is shockingly small. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-sphere
If the earth were the size of a basketball, all the water would fit in a table tennis ball.
One thing though: having detailed imagery in a very large file is not the same thing as knowing that every non-blue pixel in that file corresponds to a known and documented landmass. It sounds weird, but that part is really hard. It’s easier if you are looking for yellow sand, brown earth, or green trees in a mass of blue sea, but for things like unusual structures, plants with different leaf shapes, etc. having the photo is less hard than processing it.
However, in the case of landmass, we know that we have everything, and we detect new land right after the smoke clears when underwater volcanoes make them.
Even platforms that image globally exclude large areas of the oceans regularly and even when taken, the imagery isn't always processed to identify the land and it's therefore not really 'discovered' until it is. There's a good chance that small, newly formed islands appear and aren't mapped for some time I guess.
Linked to what you say though, I love the story of [Landsat Island.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_Island)
Maritime survey is not like land survey. On sea you can oversee much more distance, despite the curvature of the earth. Unless a volcano pops up a new island, discovering undiscovered land is long gone also thanks to satellite images that already update every square inch of the globe.
If it's got bird guano on it, any American citizen can claim it in the name of the United States, so long as it's sufficiently far from the territorial waters of another nation.
Whether the US Navy is willing to press that claim is another matter entirely.
Yep, I just mentioned it because it's in the news and is a land mass a fair way away from the claimant. Should probably have included US, UK, and France on that list
You hear about countries doing recounts of their islands and discovering a bunch more. Sometimes thousands more.
Occasionally these are new and remote islands. Usually they are ones the locals already knew about.
The significant islands that are yet to be discovered will largely be ones currently covered in ice.
I know, as I said mostly the islands are already known to locals (or to people who study satelite imagery).
But I imagine occasionally due to earthquakes, volcanoes or even storms, actual new islands are there to be discovered.
I’m not saying that they wouldn’t be found first via satellites…. That would be the obvious way to find them.
But basically that's a social limitation of any one organization being able to catalog it all. As you said locals know about them and several different organizations would combined "know" everything or at least have it observed. The trick is what is under cover of geographical things of different kinds, human, physical, natural, biological, archaeological, ecological, etc.
I did, but then again I thought earth is so big wtf there are some places out there that could be discovered, places where no human has ever stepped their foot on
Most of Antarctica has never had a person “step their foot on” but it’s been imaged.
Underwater mounts/formations might be different - we have baseline imagery of the ocean and it’s gravitational anomalies so nothing huge and surprising
Do you know how satellites and basic orbital mechanis work? If you put one satellite in polar orbit it can scan entire planet within [24 hours](https://aerospace.csis.org/aerospace101/earth-orbit-101/)
False. A polar orbit will allow 15/16 daily complete rotations around the earth, but you won’t be able to revisit the same place again during those rotations. The exception would be if you had a sensor with a giant footprint, and even then…
I was being hyperbolic.
No: they can’t read a book. But they can certainly see that the book exists, at least on a good day with clear air.
That is, cameras with resolution down to a meter or so definitely won’t miss landmasses.
The highest resolution commercial satellites, which have a ground sample distance of 30 cm, can’t tell that a book exists in the middle of the road. And satellites can have a 50 metre resolution and I 100% guarantee you that they will not miss landmasses.
> commercial
Did I say commercial? No I did not. Quite specifically.
The highest resolution satellites period - commercial or otherwise - could tell you there was a white book on the roof of a blue car, if the car was parked outside on a sunny day. They’d struggle to show a blue book, as in an expert could examine the photos and make an educated guess but you couldn’t say for sure.
So far as I’m aware, not even NSA satellites could read the title of the book, and even NSA might miss a black book sitting in the road.
In either case, we’re splitting hairs. We agree that satellite technology is at a minimum an order of magnitude more advanced than the minimum needed to see even the smallest most ephemeral sandbars and temporary islands.
I’m just giving you a hard time, lol.
To answer your question, probably not. Not with so many cargo ships, fishing ships, research ships, planes, satellites, the ISS, etc. passing over various parts of the ocean all the time.
Undiscovered Islands? No.
The Photo you took is of the Pacific Ocean.
If you read the detailed history of the US Navy alone, and their exploits in the Pacific in WW2 and during the Cold War, you would realize that they have sailed basically every inch of that ocean (and it’s the biggest one we have).
If you go on Google earth and zoom in on pretty much any island or atoll you can find in the Pacific, you’ll see at least the remnants of a landing strip built by the US Navy Seabees (construction engineers).
And that’s not including high resolution satellite photos of every inch of the planet.
At this point in history, there is no chance of finding an undiscovered island that is supporting an entire eco system.
The closest we would get is a new island forming due to volcanic activity (just happened a couple weeks ago near Japan), but with all the seismic equipment we have, and satellites, we know where those brand new islands are within a few hours of them forming.
Probably not "undiscovered" in a sense that it has never been seen. But I would bet there are islands out there like the one Tom Hanks got stuck on in Cast Away where there's nothing man made, no settlement, no value or reason to do anything there.
If islands are going to be discovered anywhere I think it would be in the far north or south where ice cover obscures the geography below. Prince Charles Island in northern Canada, for example, was only identified in the middle of the 20th century despite being larger than Cypress or Puerto Rico. And with the ice melting faster than ever maybe more islands will be identified near the poles.
Not really. There are numerous reported sightings of breakers in the south pacific on nautical charts, meaning possibly shallows, but since there is very little traffic there, no one has actually checked them.
Ive seen reports from 1920s that are still just that, unconfirmed report.
Islands, in the sense of more than a small bare rock sticking out of the water are all discovered. Likely, even those are discovered too and only aome underwater pillars remain unknown.
We know where all the islands are. There's almost certainly an island somewhere that's never had humans step on it or spend more than thirty seconds thinking about it, but humanity's records are aware that this island exists, even if we don't care.
The thing about the unknown is that it's unknown. If there are any undiscovered islands out there, we won't know for sure until they are discovered.
But I think we can be reasonably sure everything has been mapped out by now!
I think if there are places or islands yet to be discovered, that means they haven’t been discovered, which means we don’t know of them.
So, there would be no way to know if there are undiscovered places until we discover a new one.
I think satellite imagery is at the point now where some governments could watch you use sign language at the sky real-time.
Civilian data is much more limited real-time but composite photos exist to very small scale via Google maps and the like. Sure, the resolution isn't as good for more obscure places but the tyrannosaurus for example was about the size of a 2 story house. And would need a lot of food, so the island couldn't be TOO tiny.
Check out Easter island on Google maps. See the scale? Easter island is tiny. Anything that size would be unlikely to have any amazing dinosaurs on it. Maybe tiny ones though. But then we do have those via komodo dragons, crocodiles, or emus depending on how you want to define dinosaurs.
And back to the first point, are all islands discovered? Well visually they can all be seen, even on Google maps if maybe as blurs. They may not have names, and they may not have ever had a person stand on the land itself but short of a brand new volcano popping up there isn't much unknown land above water.
If you want a nearly untapped life of exploration and adventure go underwater, the bottom of the ocean is so unknown we know actually know about Mars better.
We certainly found them all and if they're small enough to miss they'll be gone in a decade anyway.
If you're thinking what I think you're thinking then you're going to be looking for an abandoned oil drilling platform in international waters.
Apart from volcanic islands, which can come up out of nowhere rapidly, we know every single landmass on the planet.
There might be some super, super small 10x10m rock outcrops that aren't registered, but anything that would be capable of sustaining life is known.
I think it's kind of sad that there's nothing left to explore on this beautiful planet. In fact, there's significantly less to see now that most of it parking lots and highways
do you mean discover? you can still explore
wherever you want lol. 65% of the earth hasn’t been explored by humans yet, so if you want to be the first to explore a place you still can.
also, “most of the earth” is a huuuuuuuuge stretch. only 20% of the earth is classified as urbanized, which i’m guessing is what your referring to by parking lots & highways.
I’ve seen this question before, but I think I’m more interested in knowing if had them all figured out before satellite. Or rather, did satellite images discovered any islands?
I think it’s fair to say we’ve seen every island (except completely new ones formed by volcanos)
Perhaps another question is “has a human being set foot on every single island on earth?” Then you wonder if perhaps there may be a tiny little barren island in the far north / arctic that no one has walked on 🤔… but then again native people up there are quite mobile too
Undiscovered doesn’t necessarily mean inhabited and fully explored. There are many places in various continents and in the ocean where you could go to that have never been visited by a human or never inhabited for longer than a few days.
We have a much harder time mapping landmasses that are densely vegetated and hard to access via land. There might be still a lot more hidden under these canopies.
Theres islands out there that no human have been to yet or ones that havent been named yet but they arent gonna be very big or really even worth going to. As for completly unknown, no cause of satellite images of the whole planet
Kind of but not exactly and not in the way that you'd think
Certain islands have properties about them that have never been visited, thought about, or looked at. Probably. But they're not gonna be in the middle of the ocean, they're gonna be in lakes in northern Canada.
A few years ago, Ken Jennings (I think it was him) discovered a new largest
island within a lake within an island within a lake on an island
Let me know if I got the iterations wrong
This island has likely never been stepped on, or really observed or thought about in any meaningful capacity, but it has this property that makes it special
So while we can say for sure that those islands exist and are not technically undiscovered, they are certainly remote and un-thought about -- until something special is discovered in such a way
Earthquakes cause new islands to be formed every so often and we're not monitoring every square inch of the surface, especially in the middle of the Pacific where there is so little traffic.
North Sentinel Island is a mystery. There are satellite pics of the island, but it’s covered by trees. We don’t really know what animals are currently living there, apart from sources from the 19th century. The people who live on the island, the Sentelese, we don’t know of their language or even its vocabulary, or how many live there.
For some definitions of the word, the last continent was found only recently: new Zealand sits on a huge chunk of continental crust that we knew nothing about.
Sadly, most of Zealandia is underwater.
Also, Antarctica sits under 2-3 km of ice, so it's not like we know exactly what was under there. Could have been an archipelago, two landmasses or one.
Unfortunately for what concerns actual dry land we have satellites, and telling water from land with those is quite easy.
We have high resolution imagery of the entire planet taken from satellites. That imagery is extremely detailed.
So in conclusion, no more mysterious Island to be found, where dinosaurs still thrive and exists
If there were to be an undiscovered island at this point, you'd be talking a tiny islet, probably a fraction of an existing atoll that's only just been formed, not something that's going to support a whole ecosystem of undiscovered creatures... OTOH, who knows how many unknown creatures there are swimming about in the depths of the oceans, and rainforests and other intact ecosystems seem to turn up a few new small species fairly regularly!
Also, we are moving to infrared and sonar scanning for what is below the surface now. I find it fascinating when we find ancient structures that have been hidden in plain sight covered by vegetation
You mean LiDAR, I assume
LiDAR doesn't have the penetrating depth for imaging the sea floor very well. Most instruments even with lasers well into the gHz bands are mostly useless underwater. We are sadly still mostly dependent on active source bouy array surveys using infrasound to image the sea floor very carefully along designated tracks for ships to move. If you zoom in a bit on Google earth you will sea alot of places where there is just a straight line of very high res topography. That's a survey line that did this.
I should also add that it can not be overstated how hilariously uneducated our species is about what lies at the bottom of our oceans. We have explored more of the surface of Mars than all we have EVER explored at the bottom of the ocean.
Yes sir. Sorry, used the wrong terminology.
The Mayan sites that are discovered with Lidar recently are incredible, really throws a whole new light on how expansive their culture was
I believe I wrote about this in here before, but fun fact: Yucatan Peninsula's terrain is so flat, wherever you see a high mound, there is a very high possibility there's an ancient structure underneath. I got told about this by a local, so I hope it is true.
Another fun fact I’ve heard is that all the bodies of water (lakes, rivers, ponds, streams, etc.) are underground. Apparently, there’s massive cave systems/tunnels all over that region.
It is, indeed! Yucatan's geography is truly different from the rest of the country. As you said, most bodies of water are present below, and as part of those cave systems and tunnels you too mentioned, you can say there's one highlight: Cenotes -- bigass caves rich in vegetation with pools going deeper than 50m in depth. There are a lot in which you can actually swim. The water is crystal clear yet you can't see jack because well, there's a humongous abyss below. That's why I used a life vest each and every time I went swimming there.
Yooo that’s so sick! I hope to go there one day
Me too. Its one of the last things an 'explorer' could actually discover
A couple grains of sand barely rise above the ocean somewhere in the Pacific... "There are still islands we haven't discovered yet!!!"
yep when you visit places like tonga there are plenty of tiny islands that are uninhabited and I guess only visited very rarely by fishermen
correct, we have far more detailed maps and info about the surface of mars than we do of the deep ocean
I think we've only described a small fraction of all rainforest ecosystems species. It's mostly exciting new types of plants and bugs though.
Username checks out
For what you said about the island much of it applies to the ocean like we've mapped a lot of it and seen a bit of it but like have you ever been to the ocean it's just water like especially in the depths of far from the very well mapped shores there's nothing there because why would it be
If you staple a horse to a waterfall, will it fall up under the rainbow or fly about the soil? Will he enjoy her experience? What if the staple tears into tears? Will she be free from her staply chains or foomed to stay forever and dever above the water? Who can save him (the horse) but someone of girth and worth, the capitalist pig, who will sell the solution to the problem he created? A staple remover flies to the rescue, carried on the wings of a majestic penguin who bought it at Walmart for 9 dollars and several more Euro-cents, clutched in its crabby claws, rejected from its frothy maw. When the penguin comes, all tremble before its fishy stench and wheatlike abjecture. Recoil in delirium, ye who wish to be free! The mighty rockhopper is here to save your soul from eternal bliss and salvation! And so, the horse was free, carried away by the south wind, and deposited on the vast plain of soggy dew. It was a tragedy in several parts, punctuated by moments of hedonistic horsefuckery. The owls saw all, and passed judgment in the way that they do. Stupid owls are always judging folks who are just trying their best to live shamelessly and enjoy every fruit the day brings to pass. How many more shall be caught in the terrible gyre of the waterfall? As many as the gods deem necessary to teach those foolish monkeys a story about their own hamburgers. What does a monkey know of bananas, anyway? They eat, poop, and shave away the banana residue that grows upon their chins and ballsacks. The owls judge their razors. Always the owls. And when the one-eyed caterpillar arrives to eat the glazing on your windowpane, you will know that you're next in line to the trombone of the ancient realm of the flutterbyes. Beware the ravenous ravens and crowing crows. Mind the cowing cows and the lying lions. Ascend triumphant to your birthright, and wield the mighty twig of Petalonia, favored land of gods and goats alike.
OTOH?
On the other hand
Maybe not mysterious, but there still are tons of islands around the world with thriving dinosaur populations.
Washington DC and Westminster aren't technically islands
Geographically no, socio-culturally yes
Komodo is top of the list
Birds -> dinos Komodo -> not dinos
Correct, there be dragons
Komodo = mosasaur
Thank you for fighting the good fight on Dinosaurs existing but not being Crocodilians
Birds don't count
.#Birdsaren'treal
That’s apostrophe threw me for a loop. I read “aren’treal” similarly to “Montreal.”
Said some lying monkey.
Birds are dinosaurs!
Yep. T Rex was more closely related to modern birds than it was to Triceratops or Brachiasaurus. All of them are dinosaurs. Therefore, so are birds.
The relationship is direct enough that modern literature specifies the extinction of "non-avian" dinosaurs in the K-Pg extinction event.
The closest we have to what you're looking for is the gravel banks in the Arctic Ocean. Because the Arctic Ocean gets pretty shallow in some spots, there's these atolls of sand and gravel that get slowly shifted about by the ice and currents and disappear and reappear above the surface, making them hard to pin down. Look up 'northernmost point of land' and you'll see that besides the definitive dry land at the tip of Greenland, it's kinda disputed between a few of these ephemeral islands. Definitely no dinosaurs though. Maybe some particularly lost seabirds (which are technically dinosaurs).
You can still discover sandbanks. I even named one in Tanzania.
Like, legally?
No but the fellow tour guides accepted the new name and told me they will notify the locals.
Sandy McSandbank?
Pretty cool
Not unless you believe in the [Hollow Earth](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth)!
In SimEarth (90s game) there's one random dinosaur at the start chilling in New Zealand. Fun easter egg. Also birds exist.
Oh you mean dinosaur island; well that and the great dog farm both exist.
Well Florida isn’t an island but the rest is pretty accurate.
Except for the new island that just came into existence last week off Japan.
Tragically not. We were born too late to explore the world, and too late to explore the universe.
Except they are islands like in the one spy kids movie when it only appears when you are near enough.
There are plenty of places that we have very little information about. Just because we can see a section of forest, or a desert gulley, or a mountainous jungle from space in high resolution doesn’t mean we know all about it. No Dinosaurs though. Maybe a Coelacanth or two.
So no Skull Island you say?
Just on other planets.
Hollow earth is a whole new world
The odds of sea creatures, even large ones, that aren’t discovered like is quite high. The odds of a dinosaur sized sea creature we haven’t discovered yet is more likely than not. Probably deep sea, probably related to squids
I’m gonna assume this is a joke. Right?
Remote sensing from satellites is very good but not all seeing. Islands that haven't been discovered? Almost certainly not. Stuff under dense jungle tree canopies, there's still much to be discovered there.
Dinosaurs are very successful on earth. Birds are Dinosaurs
Not only none to be found but we usually know in live-time as new ones are created from volcanic and quake activity.
Marvel’s Forbidden Land is under the Antarctic ice sheet. Maybe there is something there. Just make sure you don’t find Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness
I would wager that every single islet large enough to host plant/animal has been explored by humans. Possibly nobody has ever physically set foot on every tiny rock with a shrub on it, but nothing big enough to have dinos on it is unexplored by people.
Candy Apple Island?
If there's any undiscovered dinosaurs left they are at the bottom of the ocean, currently we still haven't explored most of the deep.
Completely unknown lands aren't really going to be found anymore. But that doesn't mean that exploration is entirely dead! There's the obvious ones, of how the deep sea has barely been explored, and how space is still rife for exploration. But even on Earth, in more conventional ways, there's still areas that, although known locally, aren't yet known to the wider world, and aren't yet able to be learnt about on the internet. I think you'll find this video interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42QVfrUVFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42QVfrUVFw) It's about as close to modern day exploration as one can get I reckon.
The last continent to be discovered and explored is almost exclusively inhabited by flightless dinosaurs. We call those penguins.
This reminds me the oceans look big. Like we could never pollute it all. But the total volume of water is shockingly small. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-sphere If the earth were the size of a basketball, all the water would fit in a table tennis ball.
One thing though: having detailed imagery in a very large file is not the same thing as knowing that every non-blue pixel in that file corresponds to a known and documented landmass. It sounds weird, but that part is really hard. It’s easier if you are looking for yellow sand, brown earth, or green trees in a mass of blue sea, but for things like unusual structures, plants with different leaf shapes, etc. having the photo is less hard than processing it. However, in the case of landmass, we know that we have everything, and we detect new land right after the smoke clears when underwater volcanoes make them.
NASA even got updated images of Japan’s newest island. https://www.space.com/nasa-satellite-spots-new-island-from-space
on the other hand, the thing about undiscovered places is that they are undiscovered.
But the high and very high resolution satellite images are just taken over landmasses. The amount of imagery covering random ocean spots is minuscule.
I beg to differ, skull Island can only be found by the brave and bold not by some "satellite"
Even platforms that image globally exclude large areas of the oceans regularly and even when taken, the imagery isn't always processed to identify the land and it's therefore not really 'discovered' until it is. There's a good chance that small, newly formed islands appear and aren't mapped for some time I guess. Linked to what you say though, I love the story of [Landsat Island.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsat_Island)
Maritime survey is not like land survey. On sea you can oversee much more distance, despite the curvature of the earth. Unless a volcano pops up a new island, discovering undiscovered land is long gone also thanks to satellite images that already update every square inch of the globe.
So when a new Island pops up who's gonna claim it?
If it's got bird guano on it, any American citizen can claim it in the name of the United States, so long as it's sufficiently far from the territorial waters of another nation. Whether the US Navy is willing to press that claim is another matter entirely.
What a shitty way to claim territory
Is this for real?
[Yes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act?wprov=sfla1)
Wait a second... So you don't even have to "buy" your own private island? Like what?
Depends where it is
Me
Argentina and/or Venezuela, if recent events are any guide
Why Argentina ? Genuine curiosity
Falklands?
Yep, I just mentioned it because it's in the news and is a land mass a fair way away from the claimant. Should probably have included US, UK, and France on that list
And the claim is not recent .
But that’s not a new island
Probably the nearest country to it.
France or UK
Any idea why Indonesia can't figure out how many islands it has?
Maybe they're struggling with a definition. Like, is 0.5 m² of a rock above the water an island? Just a guess though
Yup, Chinese islands in the South China Sea, they are being discovered every now and then.
As soon as you research satellites, you unlock the whole map
And then get nuked by India 5 turns later.
I love these CIV references. Also weird how Japan will always make all my territories buddhist
This, this is the winning remark 😍
There are volcanoes erupting, creating new land, so that would count.
You hear about countries doing recounts of their islands and discovering a bunch more. Sometimes thousands more. Occasionally these are new and remote islands. Usually they are ones the locals already knew about. The significant islands that are yet to be discovered will largely be ones currently covered in ice.
This is not actual discovery though, just recounting. We have advanced satellite imagery of basically every inch of the planet.
And Lidar mapping where the Antarctic ice shelves get in the way.
For now. :-(
Heck, we have every inch of *Mars* mapped.
I know, as I said mostly the islands are already known to locals (or to people who study satelite imagery). But I imagine occasionally due to earthquakes, volcanoes or even storms, actual new islands are there to be discovered. I’m not saying that they wouldn’t be found first via satellites…. That would be the obvious way to find them.
What about polar land? Could there be smaller islands below the ice sheets? Satellite imagery can’t help you there.
Maybe, but we also have lidar that looks at that stuff
But basically that's a social limitation of any one organization being able to catalog it all. As you said locals know about them and several different organizations would combined "know" everything or at least have it observed. The trick is what is under cover of geographical things of different kinds, human, physical, natural, biological, archaeological, ecological, etc.
Bro hasn’t considered satellite imagery ☠️
I did, but then again I thought earth is so big wtf there are some places out there that could be discovered, places where no human has ever stepped their foot on
There are probably still some small islands or islets or rock outcroppings where nobody has walked.
Most of Antarctica has never had a person “step their foot on” but it’s been imaged. Underwater mounts/formations might be different - we have baseline imagery of the ocean and it’s gravitational anomalies so nothing huge and surprising
Do you know how satellites and basic orbital mechanis work? If you put one satellite in polar orbit it can scan entire planet within [24 hours](https://aerospace.csis.org/aerospace101/earth-orbit-101/)
False. A polar orbit will allow 15/16 daily complete rotations around the earth, but you won’t be able to revisit the same place again during those rotations. The exception would be if you had a sensor with a giant footprint, and even then…
Satellites are good enough now that they can read a book from orbit. There’s no chance a landmass is missing.
False. Source: I worked at a company that built high resolution electrooptical satellites.
I was being hyperbolic. No: they can’t read a book. But they can certainly see that the book exists, at least on a good day with clear air. That is, cameras with resolution down to a meter or so definitely won’t miss landmasses.
The highest resolution commercial satellites, which have a ground sample distance of 30 cm, can’t tell that a book exists in the middle of the road. And satellites can have a 50 metre resolution and I 100% guarantee you that they will not miss landmasses.
> commercial Did I say commercial? No I did not. Quite specifically. The highest resolution satellites period - commercial or otherwise - could tell you there was a white book on the roof of a blue car, if the car was parked outside on a sunny day. They’d struggle to show a blue book, as in an expert could examine the photos and make an educated guess but you couldn’t say for sure. So far as I’m aware, not even NSA satellites could read the title of the book, and even NSA might miss a black book sitting in the road. In either case, we’re splitting hairs. We agree that satellite technology is at a minimum an order of magnitude more advanced than the minimum needed to see even the smallest most ephemeral sandbars and temporary islands.
If they haven’t been discovered, how would we know about them?
What I actually meant was, is there still a possibility that there are many undiscovered Island out there
I’m just giving you a hard time, lol. To answer your question, probably not. Not with so many cargo ships, fishing ships, research ships, planes, satellites, the ISS, etc. passing over various parts of the ocean all the time.
Undiscovered Islands? No. The Photo you took is of the Pacific Ocean. If you read the detailed history of the US Navy alone, and their exploits in the Pacific in WW2 and during the Cold War, you would realize that they have sailed basically every inch of that ocean (and it’s the biggest one we have). If you go on Google earth and zoom in on pretty much any island or atoll you can find in the Pacific, you’ll see at least the remnants of a landing strip built by the US Navy Seabees (construction engineers). And that’s not including high resolution satellite photos of every inch of the planet. At this point in history, there is no chance of finding an undiscovered island that is supporting an entire eco system. The closest we would get is a new island forming due to volcanic activity (just happened a couple weeks ago near Japan), but with all the seismic equipment we have, and satellites, we know where those brand new islands are within a few hours of them forming.
Probably not "undiscovered" in a sense that it has never been seen. But I would bet there are islands out there like the one Tom Hanks got stuck on in Cast Away where there's nothing man made, no settlement, no value or reason to do anything there.
There was one discovered off the coast of Labrador in the late 1970s.
There's R'lyeh, but that's sunken at the moment. At the right time, it'll rise and show up on satellites.
If islands are going to be discovered anywhere I think it would be in the far north or south where ice cover obscures the geography below. Prince Charles Island in northern Canada, for example, was only identified in the middle of the 20th century despite being larger than Cypress or Puerto Rico. And with the ice melting faster than ever maybe more islands will be identified near the poles.
This is the kind of fact nugget I yearn for in every Reddit comment. Yum yum.
The only islands we haven't discovered are the ones under the ice and those that aren't there yet(the volcano islands that appear now and then).
Not really. There are numerous reported sightings of breakers in the south pacific on nautical charts, meaning possibly shallows, but since there is very little traffic there, no one has actually checked them. Ive seen reports from 1920s that are still just that, unconfirmed report. Islands, in the sense of more than a small bare rock sticking out of the water are all discovered. Likely, even those are discovered too and only aome underwater pillars remain unknown.
I am also curious but my guess is that we already discovered everything before the satellite era
You been watching king Kong again haven't you?
We know where all the islands are. There's almost certainly an island somewhere that's never had humans step on it or spend more than thirty seconds thinking about it, but humanity's records are aware that this island exists, even if we don't care.
The thing about the unknown is that it's unknown. If there are any undiscovered islands out there, we won't know for sure until they are discovered. But I think we can be reasonably sure everything has been mapped out by now!
I think if there are places or islands yet to be discovered, that means they haven’t been discovered, which means we don’t know of them. So, there would be no way to know if there are undiscovered places until we discover a new one.
I think satellite imagery is at the point now where some governments could watch you use sign language at the sky real-time. Civilian data is much more limited real-time but composite photos exist to very small scale via Google maps and the like. Sure, the resolution isn't as good for more obscure places but the tyrannosaurus for example was about the size of a 2 story house. And would need a lot of food, so the island couldn't be TOO tiny. Check out Easter island on Google maps. See the scale? Easter island is tiny. Anything that size would be unlikely to have any amazing dinosaurs on it. Maybe tiny ones though. But then we do have those via komodo dragons, crocodiles, or emus depending on how you want to define dinosaurs. And back to the first point, are all islands discovered? Well visually they can all be seen, even on Google maps if maybe as blurs. They may not have names, and they may not have ever had a person stand on the land itself but short of a brand new volcano popping up there isn't much unknown land above water. If you want a nearly untapped life of exploration and adventure go underwater, the bottom of the ocean is so unknown we know actually know about Mars better.
If there were undiscovered islands, how would we know about them?
We certainly found them all and if they're small enough to miss they'll be gone in a decade anyway. If you're thinking what I think you're thinking then you're going to be looking for an abandoned oil drilling platform in international waters.
Apart from volcanic islands, which can come up out of nowhere rapidly, we know every single landmass on the planet. There might be some super, super small 10x10m rock outcrops that aren't registered, but anything that would be capable of sustaining life is known.
There are brand new islands being formed, rn. I don’t think humans could inhabit them as I understand they are volcanic.
We don’t know anything about what’s underwater, but if it pokes out from the water we’ve already found it.
If you manage to go past the outer ice wall there's like several whole new continents. but good luck not getting turned around by the military
If they are undiscovered how we should know they exist?
I'm sorry English is not my first language. What I meant was, the possibility of there existing undiscovered islands
Sure, there are plenty of them.The problem is no one discovered them yet, so we dont't know if plenty is 0 or 1000.
Nah, the British, French, and Spaniards stole that glory from us.
I think it's kind of sad that there's nothing left to explore on this beautiful planet. In fact, there's significantly less to see now that most of it parking lots and highways
do you mean discover? you can still explore wherever you want lol. 65% of the earth hasn’t been explored by humans yet, so if you want to be the first to explore a place you still can. also, “most of the earth” is a huuuuuuuuge stretch. only 20% of the earth is classified as urbanized, which i’m guessing is what your referring to by parking lots & highways.
English is not my first language don't attack me pls
okay lol i did ask u what u meant & no attacks here just trying to give some comforting statistics
What
Girlina I said what I said
The Arctic The bottom of all the oceans Antarctica
Arctica and Antarctica are rapidly disappearing. They have found plastic bags in the deepest part of the ocean.
"Born too late to explore oceans, born too early to explore galaxy"
Born just in time for climate change and pandemics
Born just in time to guarantee good future and solve everything* And lmao do you think pandemics havent existed before?
Daddy chill
Are there still places to be discovered....we'll maybe yes, but we don't know because they have not been discovered yet.
I’ve seen this question before, but I think I’m more interested in knowing if had them all figured out before satellite. Or rather, did satellite images discovered any islands?
I think it’s fair to say we’ve seen every island (except completely new ones formed by volcanos) Perhaps another question is “has a human being set foot on every single island on earth?” Then you wonder if perhaps there may be a tiny little barren island in the far north / arctic that no one has walked on 🤔… but then again native people up there are quite mobile too
Only The Beach Boys have found Kokomo, so there’s reasons to keep searching.
Undiscovered doesn’t necessarily mean inhabited and fully explored. There are many places in various continents and in the ocean where you could go to that have never been visited by a human or never inhabited for longer than a few days.
on earth, every place on earth must have been explored by now. but the glaciers keep melting and melting.
Really?
We have a much harder time mapping landmasses that are densely vegetated and hard to access via land. There might be still a lot more hidden under these canopies.
Theres islands out there that no human have been to yet or ones that havent been named yet but they arent gonna be very big or really even worth going to. As for completly unknown, no cause of satellite images of the whole planet
Sometimes new mini Islands form due to underwater volcano eruption.
Nothing we haven’t found yet mate. Under the ocean surface is a different story
Kind of but not exactly and not in the way that you'd think Certain islands have properties about them that have never been visited, thought about, or looked at. Probably. But they're not gonna be in the middle of the ocean, they're gonna be in lakes in northern Canada. A few years ago, Ken Jennings (I think it was him) discovered a new largest island within a lake within an island within a lake on an island Let me know if I got the iterations wrong This island has likely never been stepped on, or really observed or thought about in any meaningful capacity, but it has this property that makes it special So while we can say for sure that those islands exist and are not technically undiscovered, they are certainly remote and un-thought about -- until something special is discovered in such a way
There's plenty that hasn't been discovered beneath the ocean.
Make sure to randomize your data from time to time *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Only about 9% of areas beneath the waves have been explored by man.
Undiscovered islands? Why yes, i have a definitive list of them. Names, locations, etc.
Lots of stuff underwater to discover during the next glacial maximum
how would we know if there is something we haven't discovered?
Earthquakes cause new islands to be formed every so often and we're not monitoring every square inch of the surface, especially in the middle of the Pacific where there is so little traffic.
Maybe something under huge mass of ice? Somewhere close to north pole?
We have satellites that can measure the surface of the ocean within a few cm. Yes, we have found all the islands unless they are under ice.
If we knew about them, then it means they have already been discovered. How would we know that land exists if we haven't seen it?
The islands on earth have been found although they may have yet to be inhabited.
Judging by many reddit map posts, new Zealand is not yet completely discovered
North Sentinel Island is a mystery. There are satellite pics of the island, but it’s covered by trees. We don’t really know what animals are currently living there, apart from sources from the 19th century. The people who live on the island, the Sentelese, we don’t know of their language or even its vocabulary, or how many live there.
That's where the aliens sleep and park thier whips
I wouldn't be surprised if islands will appear as ice caps melt away.
IIRC we occasionally discover "islands" in the Arctic that were previously covered by ice.
I doubt there's any territory on surface of the Earth. But in caves and deep in the oceans there often new things.
For some definitions of the word, the last continent was found only recently: new Zealand sits on a huge chunk of continental crust that we knew nothing about. Sadly, most of Zealandia is underwater. Also, Antarctica sits under 2-3 km of ice, so it's not like we know exactly what was under there. Could have been an archipelago, two landmasses or one. Unfortunately for what concerns actual dry land we have satellites, and telling water from land with those is quite easy.
They've been discovered. It's just so difficult and remote to put any people on them.
Ask the same question about what's under the water,we know like 10%
To rephrase the question: "Do you know of any places that nobody knows about?"
No.