The Missing Island...!

This following article is something that you don't hear everyday. A complete island off the coast of Japan has gone missing, completely disappeared.

Japanese Island Disappears

Photo credit: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP

Japanese officials have recently noticed that one of their islands off the northeast coast has vanished.

The tiny island was called Esanbe Hanakita Kojima. It was completely uninhabited and was likely eroded by wind and drift ice coming in from the Sea of Okhotsk. Normally, such a disappearance would be unimportant, but the islet had some value due to its positioning. It was an outlying island used by Japan to delineate its exclusive economic zone. Specifically, it was located west of a disputed region between Japan and Russia known as the Northern Territories.

The missing islet was brought to the attention of authorities by author Hiroshi Shimizu, who went to the nearby village of Sarufutsu to work on a book about Japan’s “hidden” islands.[9] Curiously, the locals hadn’t noticed its disappearance, even though the tiny strip of land was located 500 meters (1,640 ft) away. Fishermen avoided the area because it was marked as an undersea reef on navigation charts, and the Japanese coast guard last surveyed the island back in 1987.

While this may not seem to be an uncommon thing there, I am curious about exactly what happened to it? I'm just curious that way. I got this article from Listverse, of course.

Coffee out on the patio this morning!