Phantom islands—islands on the map that turn out never to have existed—have come up a few times here on The Map Room. But it’s wild to see one in real time—and in satellite imagery. Which is what happened this summer in on Williston Lake, a reservoir in northern British Columbia upstream of the W. A. C. Bennett Dam, where rising water levels broke free a mass of trees growing on driftwood roughly 70 by 140 metres in area. The island’s existence was confirmed by satellite imagery—and then it vanished. It was spotted again in imagery a month later, about 30 km northwest of its last location.
