What is this geological structure?

[taeto]

I noticed on the Johns Hopkins map of the Covid-19 outbreak a big blob off of the west coast of Africa.

 

Not sure what to make of it, I took a look at Google Maps to see if there is any populated island located south of Accra and west of Gabon just outside the bay of Guinea. But the map shows no land area. However there is a kind of unusual structure apparently not far below water surface in this location. In the first of the below satellite shots it is only a little cross shape. Magnification shows an uncharacteristic looking feature about 2x2 kilometers in size.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 25, 2020 by taeto

[Strange]

5 minutes ago, taeto said:

I noticed on the Johns Hopkins map of the Covid-19 outbreak a big blob off of the west coast of Africa.

Is it on the equator? And vertically aligned with Greenwich in London? It might just be a default location for data that doesn't have a valid latitude and longitude (ie. 0,0).

I don't know what the blob in is in the other pictures. Maybe an island (underwater mountain)? Or perhaps an artefact of zooming in to 0,0?

[taeto]

True, it is close to (0,0). I looked at that already. Clicking on the map gives -0.004955, -0.023410.

The blob should probably not be there, but it represents cases that belong randomly elsewhere on the globe.

The satellite however, why should satellite data be collected in a fashion so that pixels from other places get thrown into this location? On the other hand, if it is a genuine geological feature, it seems rather unique.  

 

[swansont]

If you zoom out, you should see a number of similar features. Probably underwater mountains.  

[taeto]

1 minute ago, swansont said:

If you zoom out, you should see a number of similar features. Probably underwater mountains.  

I see lots of underwater mountains in the same extended region of the Atlantic. Seen from satellite they all look different from this one. Not similar.  

[swansont]

2 minutes ago, taeto said:

I see lots of underwater mountains in the same extended region of the Atlantic. Seen from satellite they all look different from this one. Not similar.  

I see more detail, which suggests to me that the features are nearer to the surface. The other structures you can see lose detail as you get to deeper water. There's also the matter of the photographs/scans probably having lower resolution where there are no features to see. If it's something near the surface that might be of more interest for sea traffic and might have been scanned in more detail.

There's a lot of underwater detail near Ascension island, too (look near -7.950000, -13.830000), but other areas nearby obviously have lower resolution.

[taeto]

It is just another mountain, a little closer to the surface than normal. And very close to the intersection of Greenwich and the Equator. The numerologists ought to be attracted to it like (insert favorite disgusting insects) to (insert excretion by favorite domestic animal). Does it look volcanic, so that it might have been an actual island previously? St. Matthew Island?     

[iNow]

Shhh... That's Atlantis. Don't tell anyone!

[Strange]

2 hours ago, taeto said:

The numerologists ought to be attracted to it like (insert favorite disgusting insects) to (insert excretion by favorite domestic animal).

The reason I immediately thought of the red blob being a data error was because there was a thread (somewhere) by someone who had based a whole conspiracy theory on a similar data problem.

[Delberty]

On 3/25/2020 at 10:58 AM, taeto said:

I noticed on the Johns Hopkins map of the Covid-19 outbreak a big blob off of the west coast of Africa.

 

Not sure what to make of it, I took a look at Google Maps to see if there is any populated island located south of Accra and west of Gabon just outside the bay of Guinea. But the map shows no land area. However there is a kind of unusual structure apparently not far below water surface in this location. In the first of the below satellite shots it is only a little cross shape. Magnification shows an uncharacteristic looking feature about 2x2 kilometers in size.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those are underwater features, seamounts canyons trenches and the like