The island gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the R/V Southern Surveyor, an Australian research ship,[2] passed through the area and "undiscovered" it.

[5] The depiction is part of the existing Grand Terre reef encasing New Caledonia, with coordinates of the area generally true to within 20 nautical miles (35 kilometres), despite Cook's use of dead reckoning.

in 1876–79, the nearest charted land or reef was the Chesterfield Islands 100 kilometres (55 nautical miles) westwards on the Bellona Plateau.

was four degrees of longitude—hundreds of miles—further east than the 160° E that became the usual location of the fictitious Sandy Island on later charts and maps that were drafted after the development of the marine chronometer and accurate longitude reckoning.

The erroneously reported island persisted because it was included in the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS), a data set originally developed by the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (now the National Geospatial‐Intelligence Agency, NGA) during the conversion from physical charts to digital formats, and now used as a standard global coastline data set.

One of the most commonly used derived products of WVS is the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Shoreline Geography Database (GSHHG), which is ported with Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software.

[12] A discovery of the island's absence was again made on 22 November 2012 by Australian scientists aboard the R/V Southern Surveyor studying plate tectonics in the area.

[13][15] The status of the purported island also became the subject of discussion on scientific mailing lists, such as GMT-HELP, in late November 2012.

Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land.

On Google Earth's default view, the island area is covered by black pixels, but the program's historical imagery feature displays a satellite image of the southern portion taken by DigitalGlobe on 3 March 2009, showing a darkened sea.