In a lake in northern British Columbia, an island suddenly appeared, almost out of thin air, thickly covered in fully-grown trees. When a boater posted footage of the new island on social media, incredulous officials thought the video was AI-generated, according to the New York Times.
But it was no hoax. Satellite imagery of Williston Lake, an artificial reservoir and Canada’s largest body of freshwater, confirmed that the nearly two-and-a-half acre island was real.
“This is a first for us, for this reservoir,” Bob Gammer, a spokesman for BC Hydro, the government-owned utility that operates the reservoir, told the NYT.
Speaking to The Guardian, he added: “In the days of AI, you really needed another form of verification or evidence like a corroborating eyewitness account. And soon, we got that.”
The island was floating roughly 60 miles west of the reservoir’s WAC Bennett dam. BC Hydro believes the island is a chunk of the reservoir that broke off from a sheltered piece of shoreline due to water levels that are the highest in 14 years. Over the course of several years, logs and woody debris could have accumulated in this area, Gammer explained, forming a sort of raft on which trees can grow — and embark on naval expeditions, apparently.
“We could easily see that a mass of woody debris with live vegetation on top of it rises up, floats and breaks free from the shoreline,” Gammer told the NYT. “Then the winds in the reservoir carry it out into open water. So that’s our best guess at how this all came to be.”
Just as experts began coming to terms with the new island, it showed it had another trick up its sleeve. Sometime around August 5, the island disappeared, according to Scientific American. Then on August 15, fresh satellite imagery showed that it had reappeared again — some 20 miles northwest of where it was first spotted, hugging the shore.
Did the island swink, swim, or — we find ourselves asking because of its incredible powers — turn invisible? It’s likely that it temporarily drifted to shore, blending in with the shoreline before drifting out to the water again.
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