alt Hacker NewsIt's not explicitly stated but it seems that this island was not charted because the area it was in had previously been full of icebergs.
> On the satellite images analysed, the island could hardly be distinguished from the numerous icebergs drifting around in the immediate vicinity due to its ice cover.
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Also, it’s Antarctica. Observation at the poles is patchy compared to elsewhere on Earth. Low satellite coverage, illumination issues, lack of incentives, etc. - and that’s just satellite and aerial ops, never mind boots on the ground.
I was in the Antarctic about a decade ago, and this was underscored for me when we went to visit an island which has had maybe 20 humans visit, total - only to find it wasn’t where any of the charts said it was - it was about 3 miles away.
Fortunately we could just see it, as we had fine weather - which, upon further reading, neither of the previous surveys could, which explains the error - they had gone by dead reckoning in the era before GPS.
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I have no interest in finding islands, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to find icebergs that never move.