Bermeja

Bermeja (alternative spelling Vermeja ) is the name of a supposed island, which is located on many maps of the Gulf of Mexico from the 16th to the 19th century. It is on these cards about 200 km off the coast of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and 160 kilometers west of the atoll Arrecife Alacranes at the outer edge of the Campeche Bank and reportedly has an area of ​​about 80 km ².

History

This island was first mentioned by Alonso de Santa Cruz on a 1539 published in Madrid List of islands of the region. Their exact position was then given by Alonso de Chaves in the book Espejo de navegantes, who also executed there, the island appears in the distance " bright and reddish ", in Spanish: " bermeja ".

Research

Already in 1820 was strongly doubted in geographical work Derrotero de las Islas Antillas that the Isla Bermeja really exists, because it could not be discovered, among others, in 1804, at the position shown in old maps. The island was found neither in an inventory in 1997 in a study by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The water depth at the ostensible position is more than 40 m. The oldest satellite images, taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s, indicate the specified position is not an island.

Assumptions about the non-existence of the island were reinforced by the fact that a proven existence of this island would have a crucial importance for the staking of Ölbohrrechten at the Hoyos de Dona in the Gulf of Mexico. As an explanation for today's untraceable and the island including a shift of the seabed and a rise in sea level are given on the basis of global warming. Conspiracy even deal with a breakup of the previously existing island but by the CIA in order to secure U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich region. According to expert testimony, however, there at the specified coordinates is no indication that there ever have found an island. Presumably based the existence of the island in the old maps simply on a confusion. Bermeja is therefore to be regarded as a phantom island.

22:55 - 91.366666666667Koordinaten: 22 ° 33 'N, 91 ° 22 ' W