Until now, the northernmost point of land on our planet was considered to be Oodaaq , a gravel bank located north of Greenland. However, a team of scientists aboard an expedition to collect samples in the most remote part of the Danish island has just discovered, by chance, a small islet that was not known until now.
“We were convinced to find ourselves in Oodaaq, until now registered as the northernmost island in the world,” explains Morten Rasch, researcher at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen and leader of the expedition. “But when I posted photos and the island’s coordinates on social media, several American island hunters went crazy and said it couldn’t be true .”
These island hunters are amateur adventurers looking for unknown islands and whose comments on the networks led the researchers to contact an expert from the Technical University of Denmark to verify their location data. ” We realized that my GPS had failed, we thought we were in Oodaaq but we had just discovered an island even further north .”
The island, still pending to be baptized, is 780 meters further north of Oodaq. It measures about 30 by 60 meters and rises three or four meters above sea level. Researchers indicate that it is composed mainly of small mounds of mud and moraine on the seafloor.
How has it gone unnoticed?
The fact of not knowing the existence of this island may be due to the fact that it belongs to the category of “ short-lived islets ”. According to scientists, it is possible that it arose as a result of some large storm that, with the help of the sea, gradually scraped these materials from the seabed until an island was formed. And, quite possibly, its existence is very fleeting: “No one knows how long it will remain. In principle, it could disappear as soon as a new storm of great magnitude forms,” concludes the expert.
