Elaine Lennon is a film historian. She is the author of ChinaTowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne and is widely published in international film journals.

She has a background in television production and film financing and was a lecturer for a decade in film studies and screenwriting at the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.

Tales of Old Island

By Elaine Lennon

An unexplained landmass has appeared in the North Atlantic, disappeared from satellite imagery, and subsequently been located approximately 30km from where it was first observed, according to an international team of oceanographers investigating the phenomenon.

The island, which has not yet been officially named, was first detected shortly after dawn on Tuesday when the French research vessel Aurore, operating in the North Atlantic, recorded an unusual concentration of organic material at the surface of the ocean.

At first there was little reason to believe that the material represented anything more than an unusually large accumulation of driftwood, seaweed and other debris, although the weather conditions in the area were themselves sufficiently unusual to attract the attention of the vessel’s meteorological team.

The atmospheric pressure had fallen sharply during the early hours of the morning, while the wind, without any corresponding reduction in velocity, had changed direction through almost 90 degrees. A bank of fog had subsequently formed over an area of otherwise calm water, and instruments aboard the Aurore recorded an increase in temperature of approximately three degrees Celsius within eleven minutes.

There was also, according to members of the expedition, a smell of peat.

This was considered significant because there was no known source of peat within several hundred kilometres.

Frédérique Delacote, the expedition leader, initially suspected an instrumentation fault.

Delacote, a French oceanographer and documentary maker whose career has taken him from the Arctic Ocean to the deepest parts of the Pacific, has been described by colleagues as belonging to an increasingly rare school of scientific exploration in which the possession of sophisticated equipment does not entirely displace the desire to go and see what is actually happening.

His research vessel carries autonomous underwater vehicles, satellite communications, bathymetric scanners, weather balloons and a fleet of drones, but Delacote has said on several occasions that the most useful instrument available to an explorer remains the human eye.

On this occasion the human eye produced a more complicated result than the instruments.

A drone sent into the fog returned images of open water, followed by what appeared to be trees, then a grassy field, a stone wall and what one member of the expedition initially identified as a flock of sheep.

A second drone recorded only fog.

A third recorded what appeared to be a coastline.

The coastline was not present on any chart.

By 05:00, sonar equipment aboard the Aurore was registering a large mass of organic material beneath the vessel. Initial analysis suggested peat, although the presence of peat in such a location was considered sufficiently improbable that the expedition’s geologist repeated the analysis three times.

All three results were the same.

The material appeared to extend for several kilometres.

There were roots.

There were branches.

There were stones.

There were trees.

There were, according to a later analysis, sheep.

The zoologist accompanying the expedition initially maintained that the apparent sheep were rocks until the objects in question moved.

By midday the fog had lifted sufficiently for the expedition to observe the phenomenon directly.

There was now an island.

It was low-lying, green and visibly saturated with water, with areas of bog, scrub and woodland extending across its surface. The northern edge appeared to consist of low cliffs, while the western side had what looked like a beach, although the shoreline altered subtly whenever it was photographed.

The island was not marked on any nautical chart.

It did not appear on recent satellite imagery.

It did not correspond with the bathymetric data.

It was, nevertheless, approximately twenty kilometres long.

Delacote and several members of the expedition went ashore.

They found the ground unstable beneath their feet, and the geologist reported that the entire mass appeared to be floating rather than resting upon the seabed. Samples taken from its surface contained peat, marine vegetation, freshwater plants, roots, fragments of wood and pollen from species which, according to the expedition botanist, should not have been growing together.

The island was also raining.

The rain was confined to the island itself.

The surrounding sea remained under clear skies.

Weather instruments recorded precipitation falling vertically at one end of the island and almost horizontally at the other, despite there being no corresponding variation in wind direction.

At one point, according to Delacote, the rain appeared to fall upwards.

The expedition did not release footage of this event immediately because, as a spokesman later explained, the scientists were concerned that it would be interpreted as an artefact of image processing.

That concern was not unreasonable.

Within twenty-four hours, satellite imagery showed no island at all.

It was therefore reported missing.

The following afternoon it was found again, approximately 30km from its original position.

The explanation initially offered was that a large floating peat mass had detached itself from an unknown coastal area and had been carried by wind and current, although this raised the more difficult question of where the unknown coastal area might be.

No such coastline was visible on satellite imagery.

No such coastline was present in existing geographical databases.

No such coastline was known to oceanographers.

The cartographer assigned to the expedition suggested that the island might have been displaced by an unusual combination of currents, atmospheric refraction and the curvature of the Earth, while acknowledging that none of these factors could explain why the island continued to appear at different coordinates depending on who was observing it.

A meteorologist suggested that spherical distortion might be responsible.

A specialist in satellite mapping suggested an error in map projection.

A psychologist suggested that expectation might be playing a greater role than anyone had yet admitted.

This last suggestion proved unexpectedly difficult to dismiss.

When the expedition members were separately asked to draw the coastline they had seen, no two drawings were identical.

The botanist produced a low, heath-covered landscape.

The geologist produced a rocky coast.

The historian saw ruined stone buildings.

The meteorologist saw rain.

The cartographer produced something remarkably close to a familiar national outline, although he insisted that this was an unconscious consequence of his professional training.

Delacote himself drew an island which he said looked like “a place one might have known once”.

The phenomenon became stranger as more people observed it.

A remotely operated drone photographed a village which was not visible from the research vessel.

The village contained a church, a school, a post office and a public house.

A subsequent flight showed none of these buildings.

A third showed the church again, although in the meantime the church appeared to have acquired a tower.

The expedition began to suspect that the island was not merely changing but was somehow incorporating expectations into its physical structure.

This hypothesis was dismissed as anthropomorphic nonsense.

It was then supported by the appearance of a road.

The road was not present when the first survey was conducted.

It was present in the satellite imagery taken six hours later.

The road led nowhere.

Several hours after that it led somewhere.

A bridge appeared.

Then a railway line.

Then a ruined railway station.

The station had been demolished more than sixty years earlier.

Nobody aboard the Aurore had mentioned it.

The island appeared to be accumulating memory.

The idea was not scientifically respectable, but it had the advantage of explaining the evidence.

The peat itself provided an even more uncomfortable metaphor, since peat is, in geological terms, a record of accumulated vegetation, water and time, with successive layers preserving the traces of what has fallen into them. The possibility arose that the island was doing something analogous with human recollection, compressing expectation and memory into physical matter.

The more people looked at it, the more there was to see.

The phenomenon attracted international attention when an aircraft flying between North America and Europe reported a large green landmass beneath a bank of fog.

The crew photographed it.

The photographs showed cliffs.

They were not the cliffs seen by the expedition.

The aircraft reported the position.

The position was wrong.

The pilots corrected their instruments.

The island moved.

At approximately the same time, a Russian tanker operating in the region reported a separate encounter.

The vessel, the Vostok Meridian, was commanded by Captain Dimitri Volkov, an experienced mariner whose ship had been identified by several governments as part of the Russian shadow fleet, although its owners continued to describe its operations as routine commercial activity.

Volkov had little patience with optical illusions.

He trusted engines, radar and the sea.

At 03:40 ship’s time, the first officer reported land ahead.

Volkov asked where.

The officer gave him the coordinates.

There was no land there.

Nevertheless, Volkov went to the bridge and saw a headland emerging from the fog.

He described it later as low, dark and green, with a line of cliffs rising behind it.

The ship altered course.

The headland appeared to alter course as well.

Volkov altered course again.

The headland appeared closer.

Then the fog opened.

Volkov saw a coastline.

He saw fields divided by hedges, cottages, a ruined stone building and, farther inland, a range of hills.

He also saw a lighthouse.

The lighthouse flashed.

Volkov ordered his ship to stop.

The light flashed again.

When the fog closed and opened once more, the lighthouse had disappeared.

The coastline had changed.

Where the headland had been there was now a long beach.

Then there were cliffs.

Then a harbour.

Then nothing.

Volkov subsequently told Delacote that he had experienced the sensation that the coastline was following him.

Delacote asked what he thought he had seen.

Volkov did not answer immediately.

Then he said that he had seen Clare.

The name was not particularly helpful until, several hours later, the expedition’s cameras recorded a sheer line of limestone rising directly from the Atlantic.

It was the Cliffs of Moher.

They emerged from the sea in full daylight.

For approximately six minutes they stood there, unmistakable in their geological form, complete with gulls wheeling above the precipice and waves breaking against the rock.

Then they sank beneath the water.

The expedition’s geologist was unable to explain how several hundred metres of limestone cliff could have appeared in an ocean several hundred metres deep without displacing an equally extraordinary volume of water.

The ocean did not rise.

The cliffs simply ceased to exist.

The footage was checked for manipulation.

It was genuine.

A second satellite passed over the area.

The cliffs were not there.

A third satellite recorded them.

They were there.

A fourth recorded Britain.

This was the first time the expedition had obtained a reliable geographical reference.

Britain was approximately where Britain ought to be.

The anomaly was to the west.

This was reassuring until the meteorological data showed that the anomaly was itself producing a weather system which was moving towards Britain.

Fog crossed the Atlantic.

The fog crossed the new island.

The island changed.

The weather changed.

The maps changed.

A satellite image showed one coastline.

A drone showed another.

A ship’s radar showed a third.

A fisherman reported a fourth.

A tourist flying overhead reported Dublin.

There was no Dublin.

There was, however, a city.

It appeared for forty-seven minutes.

During that time its traffic was sufficiently heavy to produce a visible thermal signature.

Then the city disappeared.

Galway appeared instead.

Cork followed.

A motorway crossed the island.

A castle appeared beside it.

A hotel appeared beside the castle.

Someone, somewhere, imagined a pub.

The pub appeared.

Someone else imagined another pub.

That one appeared too.

The island was growing.

It was also becoming wetter.

The bog spread across the interior in long dark tongues, swallowing trees and exposing others. New peat accumulated at a rate which no known bogland could achieve, while pollen records suggested that vegetation was being introduced from memories rather than migration.

The expedition botanist found heather, gorse, rushes, grass and moss growing together in combinations which represented several different climatic and geographical environments.

The geologist found limestone.

The historian found ruins.

The ornithologist found birds.

The meteorologist found rain.

The economist found an airport.

Nobody admitted to having imagined the airport.

It nevertheless had two runways.

The psychological explanation was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

The island appeared to be acquiring form from the collective imagination of those who encountered it, while the physical medium through which that imagination became geography was the peat itself: compressed vegetation, accumulated time, dead matter transformed into a record of life.

A bog, in other words, was doing what memory had always done.

It was keeping things.

By now the phenomenon had become impossible to contain within the vocabulary of oceanography.

The United Nations was consulted.

The European Union requested clarification.

Several governments asked whether the new landmass represented a security issue.

The Russian government declined to comment.

Captain Volkov continued to report sightings.

His final encounter occurred during a storm.

The Vostok Meridian entered a bank of fog and encountered a headland approximately three miles ahead.

Volkov ordered the vessel to slow.

The headland grew larger.

A lighthouse appeared.

Then a church.

Then a village.

Then a long coastline.

Volkov’s crew watched as the land rose from the sea in front of them, not with the sudden violence of a volcanic eruption but with the slow, almost deliberate emergence of something which had been there all along and had merely been waiting to be noticed.

The fog thickened.

The ship’s radar failed.

The compass began to turn.

The lighthouse flashed.

Volkov flashed his navigation lights in response.

The lighthouse answered.

Then the fog opened and the entire coastline was gone.

There was only bog.

It passed beneath the ship like a vast floating carpet of roots, branches and peat.

For several minutes the crew could see trees moving upon the surface of the sea.

Then the bog disappeared.

Volkov reported the incident in twelve words.

“It is no longer following us. It knows where we are.”

By this stage the international scientific community had accepted that the landmass existed, although there remained considerable disagreement concerning what it was.

The meteorologists classified it as a weather phenomenon.

The geologists classified it as an emergent geological structure.

The botanists classified it as a biological anomaly.

The cartographers classified it as a cartographic anomaly.

The psychologists classified it as a collective perceptual phenomenon.

The lawyers classified it as a problem.

The politicians classified it as an opportunity.

The island continued to grow.

It developed rivers.

It developed lakes.

It developed roads.

It developed borders.

When somebody drew a border on a map, the border appeared on the ground.

When somebody erased it, the ground became bog.

When somebody suggested that there should be mountains in the west, mountains appeared.

When somebody remembered a particular town, the town returned.

When somebody insisted that the town had never existed, it disappeared.

The distinction between memory and geography collapsed.

Then the distinction between geography and nationality began to collapse with it.

Flags were reported.

A government building appeared.

A school curriculum was discovered.

An archaeological site was found containing artefacts from a history which had not happened.

A historian examining the material announced that some of the objects were older than the island itself.

The island was now large enough to be seen from Britain.

Ships approaching from the east reported a familiar coastline.

Ships approaching from the west reported another.

Aircraft saw different countries according to the direction from which they came.

The Aurore received its first radio transmission from land.

The voice identified itself as a coastguard station.

Delacote asked for its location.

The coastguard gave coordinates.

The coordinates changed while he was writing them down.

The weather deteriorated.

Fog covered the Atlantic.

Satellite imagery failed.

Drones disappeared.

Maps disagreed.

Radar returned mountains.

Sonar returned peat.

The Cliffs of Moher rose again from the sea.

Britain vanished behind them.

A lighthouse appeared.

A church appeared.

A railway appeared.

A motorway appeared.

A sheep appeared on the motorway.

Then another.

Then hundreds.

The bog expanded.

The rain began to fall upwards.

The wind changed direction.

The coastline moved.

The country moved.

The maps moved.

The coordinates moved.

The island was west of Britain.

Then north.

Then south.

Then nowhere.

Then everywhere.

For three hours the international agencies attempted to determine whether they were dealing with a meteorological event, an optical phenomenon, an unstable peat formation, a new geographical entity, an act of mass perception or the first known example of a nation-state achieving physical existence through collective imagination.

At 18:42 the World Meteorological Organisation convened an emergency meeting.

At 18:44 the island was visible from space.

At 18:46 it disappeared.

At 18:47 it reappeared.

At 18:49 it was larger.

At 18:52 it had a coastline.

At 18:53 it had weather.

At 18:54 it had history.

At 18:55 it had borders.

At 18:56 it had people.

At 18:57 it had a capital.

At 18:58 it had a national question.

At 18:59 nobody could agree on its name.

The meeting continued until 19:11, when the chairman asked the simplest question that had yet been put to the assembled scientists, cartographers, meteorologists, diplomats and representatives of governments.

“What, precisely, should we put on the map?”

There was silence.

Outside, the fog lifted.

The island was once again exactly where it ought to have been, lying in the Atlantic to the west of Britain, green beneath the rain, its bogs extending inland behind the cliffs, while far below the surface the roots of its impossible forests continued to gather peat, memory and the accumulated weight of everything people had ever expected to find there.

The World Meteorological Organisation issued its statement shortly afterwards, explaining that, following consultation with the relevant international authorities, it had provisionally agreed upon a single designation for the emergent landmass for use in meteorological reports, navigation warnings, satellite imagery, cartographic records and all future scientific references.

The designation was Ireland.

BBC World Service.