A floating island loaded with green, healthy-looking trees has been spotted drifting around Williston Lake in Canada, and we’ve never seen anything like it.
Rocky Avery, a British Columbia local resident and boater, shared a video of the strange floating ‘island’ on social media.
Technically, it’s more like a raft than an island, with trees and other plants growing on something seemingly buoyant, like driftwood.
The reservoir is managed by BC Hydro, a power company that harnesses electricity from the dam.
Since it’s 2026 and the internet is swamped in AI-generated videos, BC Hydro spokesperson Bob Gammer was rightly suspicious of the reports at first.
“It’s certainly something we’ve not heard of before,” Gammer told Matt Preprost at CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). “And with not very many people reporting it, it was difficult to locate.”
To independently verify the floating island’s existence, we examined the freely-available satellite data on the Copernicus Browser, as did BC Hydro.
On July 21st, 2026, a tiny green island-like blob was indeed visible from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite.
On that day, the ‘island’ was about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.
It doesn’t appear to be there in the days before, and it’s unclear where it went in the days after.
On August 31, Avery announced on his Facebook page that the island had been found again – this time in the Ospika River, which flows into Williston Lake.
He told ScienceAlert that he and his friends have plans to capture footage from underneath the island next.
You can see Avery’s footage from August 13 below, shared with permission from Avery:
While we still don’t fully understand how the ‘island’ occurred and what it’s made of, it may have something to do with the reservoir reaching full capacity for the first time in 14 years earlier this year.
Gammer suggested in his CBC interview that the floating island may have formed on the shore across several years, breaking off and floating freely when the water levels reached those record peaks.
BC Hydro let water spill from the dam in June and July, after the reservoir reached full capacity for the first time in 14 years.
“When we have full reservoirs, these higher water levels can lift material that may have been lodged along the shoreline, in a sheltered bay, and then allowing it to float free,” Gammer told CBC.
“We can’t pinpoint the origin of this floating island [but that’s] one explanation that seems reasonable.”
Related: Mysterious Artificial Islands in Scotland Are Thousands of Years Older Than We Thought
At present, the ‘island’ doesn’t seem to be posing any problems to the dam, though boaters and fishers might do well to be wary of these sorts of unmarked hazards.
Williston Lake is massive – the seventh largest reservoir in the world – and as far as we know, that floating island could still be bobbing around out there somewhere.
This article was fact-checked by Fiona MacDonald and edited by Fiona MacDonald. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
