New island discovered!

Here is the new island I have found! It's in the Pacific ocean, and as far as I can tell, it's never been discovered before! I found it using Google maps, but I can find no record of it having been discovered.

Hot off the press!!!
Want a piece of this island? It's not in any territorial waters, so I am raffling off plots. CLICK HERE to get your plot!

Snapshots from Macmilland

The island's shape is completely unique - and to me it looks exactly like an enormous coffee mug. I've been sharing this with a few colleagues who (and the cynics amongst you will start rolling your eyes here) have speculated the vegetation could be a fast-growing species of coffee plant. How excellent would that be if it were true! A brand new island, stocked with the rarest coffee beans in the world!

One of the most interesting features of Macmilland is the very strange lagoon. I assume this is the eastern rim of the volcano crater. As you zoom into it, you get a great view of what looks like a nice beach - would love to go for a swim there!

Here's a close-up of that beach.

Here's a video of the World's Biggest Coffee Mug (or Macmilland as I have named it).

New islands and how they are formed

This was one of the articles that really got me hooked on searching for new land. It seems that new islands are growing in the Adriatic Sea. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13234-new-islands-may-be-forming-in-the-adriatic-sea.html.

Nothing conclusive, but it get's you thinking - what if a volcano were to erupt underwater just enough to form a small island? You would have to be very near to see it, and you would need to be have a network of hydrophonic microphones in the region to detect the eruption. And even if you did, you wouldn't know from these records if the eruptions led to the formation of land... A new island could spring up at any time along a submarine ridge of volcanos, and not be detected.

In fact this has happened before, and was witnessed. Near Tonga, a new island formed exactly in this way: http://www.matangitonga.to/scripts/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=5&num=2351. The incredible pictures are an amazing example of how this process can work.

Of course, you think, surely if an island were to crop up, it would be spotted eventually by a passing ship, just as it was near Tonga. But what if the area was well outside the main shipping lanes, because the tract of water is prone to storms and not between two important land masses? What if no ship needs to pass by, and the new island is 1000s of kilometers from the nearest land? It just might be possible for such an island to go unnoticed for a long time. It would take between 5-15 years for plants to colonise a mineral-rich volcanic island (ref: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2422843). Could a new island go undiscovered for that long?

I have proof that I think confirms it can. All will be revealed very soon, but if I am right, there is a new, not yet discovered island on Earth, and I am the first person to see it!

Any questions: kaibentham@gmail.com

Time to start telling the world all about it!

I'm just putting the finishing touches on the very exciting discovery! Can't wait to tell the world all about it.

But first... a bit about me. My name is Kai Bentham. For the last 4 months I have been exploring the world using digital satellite imagery. The idea came to me when I read about Alex Hartley, who discovered a new piece of land near Svalbard which he called Nymark in 2004. It got me thinking - is there anywhere else in the world that hasn't been discovered yet?

So I started to research the more deserted, inhospitable parts of the world. Places where people don't go because they can't, and places where no-one is looking at... It turns out that there are vast open spaces which don't get much attention - hostile parts of huge oceans where no-one goes unless something goes wrong, and enormous tracts of icy wastes where melting ice is slowly revealing land that was hitherto hidden from sight.

So I've spent the last 5 months(!) painstakingly searching the world (or at least the most lonely parts of it), looking for something new, that no-one has uncovered. And... I think I've found something! It's tremendously exciting - a new piece of land that as far as I can tell, no-one has walked on it. I'm still checking the last few details, but I've just received verification from some very reliable sources, who agree that this is new and undiscovered, so I'm going to be posting my methods and how I found it, before I release the actual location.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer any emails: kaibentham@gmail.com. I'll be updating this blog with news and some of my methods over the next month. So - plenty more to come!