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Do they use the same methods to define "island"? The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe,
by eesmith 2y ago
Do they use the same methods to define "island"?
The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..."
While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number.
I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide."
Clearly these are not using the same definitions.
I managed to find the Global Islands data set at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3cda273 https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3c... with an explorer at https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ which should have exactly what I want, except 1) it only lists ocean islands, not inland ones, and 2) I can't figure out how to get the data by country.
It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.'
I give up.
- Etheryte 2y agoI don't think that quote implies a limit for the definition in any way. It just says that this is the count below a given threshold. It doesn't say anything about that threshold being a standard or anything of that sort.
- eesmith 2y ago> below a given threshold Is the threshold the same for all listed countries, or does it use each country's specific definition of "island"? Is it all islands, or only ocean islands?
- LtWorf 2y agoIn sweden if you dig a canal around some land, they call the result an island.
- squarefoot 2y agoDoes the canal make a fjord if one forgets to finish it?
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agoyes, but you have to pine for it
- LtWorf 2y agoThat's norway. Sweden is just mud lakes and trees
- eesmith 2y agoThe Global Islands database I linked to considers the Delmarva Peninsula ("Lower Delaware") in the US to be an island because of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, so that's not unique to Sweden.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 2y agoThere’s just literally no possible way that Sweden has an order of magnitude more islands than the US or Canada. Open up Google Earth and scan around northern coastlines of all these countries and you’ll laugh at the premise of this article. With that said I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the most documented/counted islands. That’s another thing entirely and also sort of interesting I suppose.
- cyberax 2y agoIt's actually quite an interesting question. The West Coast of the contiguous US has almost no islands, you really start getting "islandy" only in the Puget Sound. The East Coast has more islands, but then you need to decide how you classify the river deltas. Is a bump in a brackish swamp an island or not? On the other hand, Sweden has thousands of really small but also well-defined islands. They can be just several square meters in area, but they are well above the water and clearly separated from the main landmass. Alaska has similar terrain, though.
- CPLX 2y agoYeah I’m talking about more polar “drowned coastlines” which clearly are the place to go hunting for lots of islands. In the US that’s Maine and Alaska especially. Sweden sure has a lot of islands I’d believe they are #1. It’s the +10x claim that seems suspicious.
- SllX 2y agoCalifornia has more named islands than Washington, but they’re not all obvious since there’s quite a few small islands in the San Francisco Bay, Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River Delta. I tried fact checking which of the two had the most total islands between them but couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.
- cyberax 2y agoFrom a practical standpoint, sailing in the Bay Area is dead boring. There's not that much worth visiting. And once you go outside of the Bay, the next interesting stop is Japan. Puget Sound is way better. It'd be nice to quantify this somehow. I guess one metric would be "navigable rocky islands"?
- sandworm101 2y agoPart of it is based on population density. It is an island if it has a name and someone living on it. Canada has thousands, hundreds of thousands, of unnamed "islands" with nobody on them. Wherever land is relatively flat, every water body will have a few. Canada's north is so vast that even unique features remain unnamed, such as the "Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island". https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85342/island-in-a-lake-on-an-island-in-a-lake-on-an-island https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85342/island-in-a-l...
- eesmith 2y agoWhile every island which "has a name and someone living on it" might count, the links mentions: > Sweden has 221,831 counted islands ... Though Sweden is the country with the most islands in the world, less than 1,000 of them are inhabited. Thus, around 221,000 islands are counted as islands, even if not inhabited. If "large enough to be inhabited" sets the minimum size for an island, then I present Just Room Enough Island - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Room_Enough_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Room_Enough_Island - at 310 square meters / 3,300 square feet. The Wikipedia entry says that previously Bishop Rock at was formerly the smallest inhabited island, due to the lighthouse keeper living there.