Bermuda Missing; May Have "Drifted Away"

Western Atlantic, April 29, 2024 -- Cartographers at the Trans-Coastal Mappery, based in Newport, Rhode Island, announced that while inspecting satellite photography of the American eastern seaboard Wednesday they discovered the island of Bermuda to be conspicuously absent. Following up on the discovery, the cartography team attempted to telephone a number of businesses and government offices known to be located on the island, but were unable to establish contact.

"It's the strangest thing," mused a perplexed Roland Corthew, Assistant Contour Delineator at the Mappery. "The whole island seems to have just vanished without a trace."

One theory regarding the disappearance is that the island -- actually a group of 137 small islands and one large one built upon a fragile base of coral, may have "broken loose" from its moorings due to rising sea levels and simply "drifted away".

"This kind of thing happens all the time, but usually on a much smaller scale," said Dr. Filbert Smallhammer, Chief of Terrestrial Movements at the Highwater Corporation, a publicly funded research institute. "Bermuda -- if this is in fact what happened -- is a highly unusual case. In order for it to simply float away, the underlying structure of the island must have been exceptionally light."

This island's soft core may in fact be the root of the problem. While the surface territory is densely covered with offshore financial institutions, Smallhammer points out that most of their assets are in the form of low-density electronic transactions, and that they therefore do not provide the mass needed, on a geological scale, to "anchor" the island.

"Given the three meter rise in sea levels, at this point all you really need is a strong wind," he said. "Still, I'm surprised the anchored yachts that fill its many ports couldn't hold it in place."

Another theory that has been forwarded by the ODPH Group (Observatory for Deviant Phenomena) is that the so-called "Bermuda Triangle Effect" may have been a factor in the island's disappearance. The Bermuda Triangle was the source of extensive quasi-scientific speculation in the 1970's, owing to the fact that a disproportionate number of ships, airplanes and tax returns were suspected to have vanished mysteriously in the region over a long period of time.

"Definitely the Triangle," said Elroy Flintlock, First Secretary at ODPH. "The vortex was finally hoisted on its own petard. Serves it right."

Mappery Cartographers have now taken on extra staff to manually scan recent aerial and satellite photographs of nearby sectors of the Atlantic Ocean, in the hope of locating the missing island.

"It's got to be somewhere," said Corthew. "And if we don't find it soon, there's going to be hell to pay in some multinational boardrooms."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor