Jeannette Island, in the East Siberian Sea, was shown as a black smudge on search giant Google’s digital map tool, The Sun reported.
Reported that the company has been silent on why to cover up the cold land. It is not clear why the island is ambiguous, despite long-standing questions about whether the territory belongs to Russia or the United States. Some conspiracy theorists believe the site is ideal for Russia’s secret military bases because of its relative proximity to the United States and Canada.
Google often blocks military sites on its mapping tools, including air bases in Germany, missile silos in Russia and bases in Afghanistan, the article said. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the island’s images, which were provided to Google by the Arctic Ocean International Depth Map, a mapping project launched in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Janet Island in northern Russia was founded in 1881 by U.S. Navy officer and explorer George W. Bush. It was discovered during an expedition led by George E. DeLong. It covers only 1.2 square miles, even smaller than the venue used by the Glastonbury Festival in the UK.
Duran hoped to find open water in the Arctic Ocean around the Arctic, but after being trapped in thick ice near Herald Island for hundreds of miles in September 1879, Duran and his family approached Janet Island around May 1881.
The explorer and his crew took refuge on the island and occupied the land in the name of the United States, naming the island after their ship, the U.S. Navy’s Janet.
However, after the Exploration of the Russian Empire’s Arctic Hydrological Expedition from 1910 to 1915, Russia publicly declared Janet part of Russia along with other Arctic islands.
Administratively, the island now belongs to the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) of the Russian Federation, an claim that has never been challenged by the United States and which today recognizes it as Russian territory.
The article speculated that the likely question of who Janet belonged to prompted the decision to “erase” it on Google Maps, but that didn’t stop conspiracy theorists from coming up with their own ideas.
On the US social networking site Reddit, user exoplanetarycience wrote: “Google rarely erases things for no reason, and Google Earth searches show that the island has been permanently blurred – even in images dating back to the 1980s.” But what really fascinates me is that Janet Island is completely unobtrusive… Or at least it is believed to be. I guess there’s a hidden Russian military base there, and probably quite a bit. ”
British media pointed out that the island’s latitude and longitude is 76 degrees 47’24” N157 degrees 58’00″E, people can view themselves in Google maps.
