Filippo Reef is a reef that is asserted to be located in the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

 at 05°30′S 151°50′W, 450 km east of Starbuck Island

Starbuck Island

Starbuck Island is an uninhabited coral atoll in the central Pacific, and is part of the Central Line Islands of Kiribati...

 in the Line Islands

Line Islands

The Line Islands, Teraina Islands or Equatorial Islands, is a chain of eleven atolls and low coral islands in the central Pacific Ocean, south of the Hawaiian Islands, that stretches for 2,350 km in a northwest-southeast direction, making it one of the longest islands chains of the world...

, which was reported by the master of the Italian barque Filippo as having been seen on 28 June 1886. From an unidentified report dated 1926 of the breakers

Breaker (reef)

A breaker is a piece of reef against which waves break.This sense of the term is closely related to another sense, that of the breaking wave itself. In times past, when ocean navigation was relatively rudimentary, a line of breaking waves was a crucial indicator that a boat was bearing down upon an...

, it is estimated to have a least water depth of only 0.6 to 0.9 meters, and appeared to be about 1.6 km long northwest to southeast, and less in width.

However the only sighting referenced is on page 40 of http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/websites/pollux/pollux.nss.nima.mil/NAV_PUBS/SD/pub126/126sec02.pdf and shows a date of 1926. The topographic data supplied by http://www.gebco.net/ and accessible via http://www.wolframalpha.com/entities/undersea_features/filippo_reef/q1/il/vm/ however shows a sea depth of 3.3 miles. It is therefore likely that this 1926 report is an error, and that Filippo Reef is a phantom island

Phantom island

Phantom islands are islands that were believed to exist, and appeared on maps for a period of time during recorded history, but were later removed after they were proved to be nonexistent...

, and that therefore any maps showing it are relying on the 1926 report, and are also in error.

Nevertheless, it is marked in the 2005 edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World.

External links

• nautical description