Thinking Out Loud: How Many Islands To Map?
I have a couple of goals that I have shared with my visitors: 1) to map world shorelines and 2) to specifically focus my mapping efforts on island shorelines. By accomplishing 2) I will get to 1). Yes, the project is overwhelming. For a lone mapper, it is a quest worthy of Don Quixote.
How many islands are there scattered about the world? I spent a summer, 4-years ago, downloading island name point data from the GEOnet Names Server. 134,873 points later, I had my Islands of the World database. I sifted and sorted until I had 118,691 named islands, atolls and island groups. I isolated another group of 16,132 very small islands identified as rocks. I noted that many of the islands carried the same geographic coordinates. The listed was sifted and sorted again until I had isolated unique islands (No duplicate points). The list now stands at 68,674 islands, not counting rocks.
As I have mapped islands the number of islands has grown. Atolls, typically named by a single point, contain many individual islands (motus). My number of islands has grown significantly. The bulk of the islands will carry a label of "Name Unknown".
What is the final count? Are there 68,674 only? Are there 250,000 if you count the "Name Unknown"? I don't know! I can firmly state that there are more islands than I will ever be able to map in my brief lifetime. So many shorelines to map, so little time.
OT: Thinking
try www.sopac.org/maps for some Pacific Islands data.
Cheers
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Anonymous |
5/22/2006 05:06:00 PM