That same year, two French islands off the coast of Newfoundland met the same fate as Jura.Īccording to long-time cartographer Mike Dobson, Ph.D., founder of the digital geospatial consultancy TeleMapics and a former chief cartographer of Rand McNally, fixing simple glitches in a highly intricate system like Google Maps can be less straightforward than it seems. Back in 2010, Nicaraguan troops blamed a misdrawn border on Google Maps when they crossed into Costa Rican territory. 'I was alerted to the problem with the disappearing island of Jura at the end of last week, but Google had told one of my constituents then that they had the correction in hand.' This isn't the first time something like this has happened. I would have thought making sure every part of the globe was on it was fairly basic to the making of any map, on paper or online,' he told The Scotsman last Friday.

'It is disappointing that they don't seem to regard getting their maps right as a priority. Scotland Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning Mike Russell, who has previously had to report misspellings of other locations in the region, was displeased with the Internet company's progress in correcting matter. Jura (center) is now viewable in the satellite setting only. We're aware of the problem, and our engineers are beavering away to fix it,' she said.'We hope to have the map of Jura back to normal as soon as possible.' A U.S.-based Google representative acknowledged that there was some type of error in the system, but declined to answer more detailed questions about it, referring me to the Europe office's statement. Last week, the BBC ran a news brief with a boilerplate apology from a Google spokesperson in Europe. We're all safe and sound.' More than three weeks later, the coastline is still submerged. 'It's definitely still here,' McDonald said. Lisa McDonald, an employee of the Jura Hotel in Craighouse, a small hamlet on the eastern shores, confirmed to the outlet that, despite their digital absence, Jura-ians were still very much alive. Locals first discovered that their remote island - which is 31 miles long and has lots of wilderness but only one real village - had fallen into the digital abyss at the beginning of July, according to an initial report from the Scottish press agency Deadline. Rising seas have not swallowed the territory its odd disappearance is merely a product of a data glitch somewhere on the computer giant's servers.

Its name - thought to be derived from the Norse term for 'Island of Deer' - and its single road now simply float in the middle of the pixelated ocean, unconnected to any actual geographic feature. You can't find the Western Scottish isle of Jura, a remote 141-square-mile mass of green and bog in the Atlantic's Inner Hebrides archipelago, on Google Maps any longer. Google wiped Jura off the face of the map.

Isle of jura miniset