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This is Graham Island, or possibly Ferdinandea, or maybe Julia.
What you call it depends on where you’re from—kind of like how in most of the US
this would be a Sofa, but people from the midwest might call this a Davenport, and people
from the south would call it a lawn ornament—but whatever you think the island should be called,
it doesn’t particularly matter, because really it should just be called the Mediterranean
Ocean, because this island no longer exists.
You see, back in July 1831, some people in a little town called Sciacca, Sicily—named
such because the founders thought it would be funny if people in YouTube videos had to
pronounce “Sciacca” hundreds of years later—were out doing whatever people did
before phones when they smelled a very strong, very bad, sulfurous smell.
After a long back and forth of accusations about who smelt it and the ensuing implications
about who dealt it, they discovered that it was actually the result of an eruption by
an underwater volcano called Empedocles, located here.
First the people on land saw smoke and thought it was a boat that had caught fire, then a
sea captain saw bubbling waters and declared it a sea monster, but by July 17th, it was
clear that it was neither a ship nor a sea monster, it was something much better: an
island.
Now, I want to be clear about one thing: this island sucked.
It smelled like sulfur, it consisted entirely of a barren landscape of loose volcanic rock,
called tephra, and it was tiny—at its peak, only 4,800 meters in circumference and 63
meters tall.
Also, it was racist.
Okay maybe not that, but the island still sucked.
It was just a dumb lame tiny piece of rock, but here’s the thing about geopolitics:
sometimes dumb, lame, little pieces of rock end up mattering a lot because of where they
are—just look at the UK.
This particular dumb, lame, little piece of rock was located in the very important spot
of here, in the middle of where the Mediterranean passes between Sicily and Tunisia, which meant
whoever owned it would be able to exert control over a key sea route.
And so, given how important the island was, the international community came together
in the spirit of cooperation and reached a solution that made everybody happy…
I’m just kidding a bunch of people started fighting over it.
The first to claim it were the Brits, because after all, Britain loves claiming things—just
ask Southern Asia, or Central Africa, or North Africa, or South Africa, or the Middle East,
or North America, or Central America, or really anywhere except for maybe Kyrgyzstan.
On the first of August, 1831, a Captain in the British Royal Navy, Humphrey Fleming Senhouse,
landed on the island, planted the Union Jack, declared it for old mother England, and named
it Graham Island, after Sir James Graham, who is a guy who did some stuff, but others
soon followed.
Next was Ferdinand II, of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Remember that before 1861, the Italian peninsula was made up of a bunch of little countries,
like the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, that all kind of hated each other, unlike now, when
it’s all one country made up of a bunch of regions that all kind of hate each other.
Anyways, Ferdinand named it Ferdinandea, after his best friend, himself, then the French
claimed it as well, and called it Julia, after the month of July when it was formed, and
the Spanish king, who was also named Ferdinand, claimed it too, but he was too busy losing
the American colonies and being about to die to come up with a fourth name for the island.
For five months, the nations engaged in a heated diplomatic battle, but in the end,
a clear winner emerged: nobody.
That’s because, of course, before the dispute could be settled, the island saw all those
countries fighting over it and, much like a child in a custody dispute, decided to run
away… back into the ocean.
You see, the tephra that made up the island was loosely packed, which meant it was incredibly
susceptible to erosion—and by December 17, 1831, enough tephra had been washed away by
the Mediterranean to take the island back below sea level.
It turned out that this wasn’t the first time this had happened—in fact, it was the
fourth that we know of.
The first sighting of the island happened back during the Punic Wars between 264-241
BC, and since then, every several hundred years, when the volcano Empedocles has had
a large enough eruption, the island will briefly show back up, only for the seas of the Mediterranean
to quickly bring it back underwater—sort of like a whack-a-mole, if the hammer was
erosion and the carnie was an underwater volcano.
The island’s last appearance was for a brief moment in 1863, when it wasn’t around long
enough for anyone to even claim it.
In 2000 and 2002 scientists thought it might show up again, and Sicily even sent a diving
crew to plant an underwater Sicilian flag—which by the way, is the world’s creepiest flag—but
it never actually made it above water, which means that I had to look at this terrifying
flag for nothing.
But do you know what I didn’t do for nothing?
Fly an entire crew to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to film a feature length documentary
called, “The Final Years of Majuro.”
It’s about climate change and nuclear testing and the fate of the world, sort of, and it
doesn’t even have any bad jokes in it—in all seriousness, we worked really hard on
this thing, and I really think you’ll like it.
It’s out right now on Nebula, and definitely the best way to get Nebula is through the
CuriosityStream bundle deal, where for $20 a year you get access to CuriosityStream—home
to thousands of top quality documentaries—and to Nebula, which not only has my documentary,
but has tons of content from all your favorite educational creators.
For that bundle deal, go to curiositystream.com/HAI.