Despite not being real earth islands one could visit and explore, the islands of shape coexistence are real islands of nuclear isotopes, all exhibiting the interesting property of having shapes coexisting in their structures. Our recent work on providing a firm explanation on the phenomenon (led by Andriana Martinou and Dennis Bonatsos) is now online on the arXiv website, pending all publication on EPJ A (status: accepted).
My personal view is that this is a big step forward in understanding the dance of protons and neutrons as they generate exotic forms and species in nuclei at a theoretical level. Several questions remain to be answered in the shape of the newly proposed proxy-SU(3) model, but the ideas are now open to the nuclear physics community to digest and improve.
Here is the link, comments are of course always welcome.
Andriana Martinou, Dennis Bonatsos, T. J. Mertzimekis, K. E. Karakatsanis, I.E. Assimakis, S. K. Peroulis, S. Sarantopoulou, N. Minkov
The islands of shape coexistence within the Elliott and the proxy-SU(3) Models
An Isotopia 