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This map shows an island a bit east of the Marianas. I took a screenshot of the relavent part.

enter image description here

I hunted around for it in Google Earth with no luck, but I did find a promising candidate here:

enter image description here

I could not get any sort of label to appear, but the terrain data from Google Earth says that thing has a minimum depth of -42 meters. It's about 600 km east of the Marianas. You can see the coordinates at the bottom of the picture.

Does anyone know what it's proper name is?

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    $\begingroup$ objects in the open sea like this is normaly not named,an exeption to this is if it is close to a land mass and is used comercialy then it might be named as a fishing bank or simmilar naming of the area. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 11:02
  • $\begingroup$ Is your concern that this is displayed as an island but appears to be below sea level? Do you think this might be an atoll that is above sea level only part of the time? $\endgroup$
    – user967
    Commented Jan 15, 2018 at 18:18
  • $\begingroup$ @BarryCarter My concern is that I can't find it. I don't know what it is, island, atoll, submerged reef. It could be anything. My only concern is finding it and it's name. $\endgroup$
    – DrZ214
    Commented Jan 16, 2018 at 3:27

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To better pin down the location, I georeferenced the map getting good match of all land and sea features with a reference map. The figure below shows it overlaid over a reference map with seafloor releif: enter image description here

And the location of your mystery Island is were the red dot is, plus a 25 km search radius.

And the coordinates are (Lat/Lon): 17.0619° N, 152.177° E.

It nicely coincides with a seamount, so it might be more than an error on the map (but that seamount acoording to the data in Google Earth is more than a kilometer under the surface). What definitely seem to be an error, is including such island as part of the Northern Mariana Islands, because in all the references and maps I saw, that denomination only covers the 15 islands on the chain to the west.

I did a search for something in that location first looking as MODIS images (250 m resolution) on WorldView I had to browse trough months of images to get cloud free images, but I couldn't identify any island enter image description here

Therefore, if there, it must be tiny. After looking at the catalogs for higher resolution images, there are no Landsat images there at all (something that suggest there is no land there) but there are two Sentinel-2 scenes (10 m per pixel), and happily the cloud cover is not too bad. I did a search in those two images within the 25 km radius displayed above.

This is the first image enter image description here

And this is the second enter image description here

And again I didn't found anything. Therefore I'm inclined to think that there is nothing. But I can't rule out that something very small can be hidden by the clouds. However, I doubt it. If you want to perform the search yourself over a larger search radius, just let me know and I can give you the images.

I also searched the seamount catalog for those coordinates and the only one that show up is Vlinder Guyot about 224 km to the East. So there is no information on the one below your mystery island.

However, in this publication. It is refereed as "I'l Ichev" and is part of the "Magellan Seamounts". enter image description here

I also looked over the seamount you suggested ("Pegas" in the above map and located at 16.136° N, 151.968° E approximately), that is about 100 km away from the location pointed on the map you posted, but I didn't found any island there either (on a search box 22x26 km): enter image description here

After browsing many other maps, I've also failed to find other map showing that Island. However, in a relatively similar location some old maps show "Los Jardines" Island. It is a know "phantom" island, some more info on its wikipedia page. Here a 1932 German map showing it: enter image description here

Despite it is not in the same location, it might be the source of the confusion.

Here a list of good quality maps that DO NOT show that island:

  1. https://www.interkart.de/media/catalog/product/r/e/re01020331_1_1.jpg
  2. https://www.maps.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/thumbnail/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/p/a/pacific_ring_of_fire_wall_map_42x31.jpg
  3. https://www.nationalgeographic-maps.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7/image/8ecabcfb697832bc77ac7e2547ded39f/x/n/xng196910a.jpg
  4. http://www.melbmap.com.au/site/resources/overseas_map_samples/hema_asia_west_pacific_thumbnail_image.jpg
  5. http://universoguia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/mapa_politico_oceania.jpg
  6. http://www.gifex.com/images/0X0/2009-11-11-10993/Mapa-Fsico-de-Oceana.jpg
  7. http://www.xxlmaps.com/maps/1/map3.jpg
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  • $\begingroup$ This is definitely the best answer, thanks, especially for that really good map list. What definitely seem to be an error, is including such island as part of the Northern Mariana Islands, because in all the references and maps I saw, that denomination only covers the 15 islands on the chain to the west. Yeah I had similar thoughts as I struggled to figure out exactly what are the Marianas vs the Northern Marianas. The map I posted has other errors, in fact in the Marianas, a colored 1 juts out west, yet there's a dot in line with the others that's not colored. Pretty sure that's an error. $\endgroup$
    – DrZ214
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 7:21
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According to the Seamount Catalog that particular seamount is unnamed. From the co-ordinates you gave (16.12 N, 152 E) the nearest seamount is Del Cano Seamount with co-ords of 16 N, 148 23' E, which is about 3.5 degrees of longitude to the west of the seamount you are asking about.

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