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There’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
by CPLX 2y ago
There’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"?
- eesmith 2y agoI went to the Geographic Names Information System at https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc... Name search, Names search mode is "Exact Match", Feature Classes is "Island". State (FIPS) of "California (O6)" gives 522 named places. State (FIPS) of "Washington (53)" gives 422 named places. Note that this list includes river and lake islands, including islands in reservoirs. There are two islands named "The Island" in California, neither in Wikipedia, and the one at 41.0922983, -121.4803677 does not appear to be an island.
- SllX 2y agoThat’s what I used too, but the limitation is named places.
- johanneskanybal 2y agoIt all depends on what you count/map. By some european definition Sweden has 24 islands if you discount all the small ones. We basically have an extreme anount of small ones from the last ice age. Bit whatever, it’s a great place to sail/visit no matter how you count.