What am I supposed to be seeing? I don’t see anything remarkable.
Oh, never mind, not my area of expertise.
The image seems to have been taken back in March 2010:
http://earth.eo.esa.int/cgi-bin/satimgsql.pl?show_url=2142&startframe=0
If you look at the location in Google Maps, there’s definitely a dark patch of water:
Although it’s not actually on the picture - it’s off to the west a little bit.
My guess is that someone at the ESA was sifting through the pictures taken by Kompsat-2, picked one, and sent it out with a brief press release with some background information about the location. At that point a writer at OurAmazingPlanet skimmed through the press release and alighted on the words “black hole”, and that got them thinking, and even though the black hole isn’t in the picture they didn’t care. They just didn’t stop to think about it, they didn’t care, they came up with a snappy headline that bears no relationship to the image. And it has been copied and copied and copied by other news organisations.
That’s the answer. You’ll notice that the ESA’s statement doesn’t explicitly say that it’s a photo of the “black hole”, merely that there is one in the general area.
I personally thought the first picture was badass. :o
Ah. I expected the photo accompanying an article about a geological feature to feature the geological feature.
How fallible of me.
I thought that it’s the contrast between the water on the north shore vs. the lagoon[?] water on the south, which is quite dark in that picture.
The thing is, I can’t quite make sense of “the freshwater lagoon has a deep rocky hole that surrounds the island”. Also, the Google satellite photo shows what I’m calling the lagoon as a bright blue. It is darker than the water on the other side, except that it may not be the same photo.