a blog about islands
A photographer on Flickr wondered about this little Canadian island:
This is Paugnang Island, a small, barren island east of Padloping Island, off southeast Baffin Island. It is about 7.5 sq km / 2.9 sq miles.
Despite its small size, it rises some 667 m / 2,188 feet. It is steep-sided except at the south end, but has a relatively flat top.
Source: Toporama, Natural Resources Canada; area measurements by WorldIslandInfo.com
The website Treehugger recently suggested eight places — low-lying islands, more specifically — that will “soon” be uninhabitable due to climate change.
They are:
“Soon” is a relative term here–many of these places would still be inhabitable for decades, under current sea-level rise forecasts.
The Pacific islands involve relatively small numbers of people; they could actually be moved, though this would involve irreparable cultural destruction. Bangladesh illustrates another level of impact: millions of people live on these low-lying islands, and tens of millions in vulnerable coastal areas.
This is of course a tiny part of the problem; hundreds of thousands of islands are in danger of disappearing or greatly shrinking in the face of sea-level rise.
(Thanks to Stu Gagnon for the tip.)
Image: Maldives from space, courtesy NASA
This week an undersea volcano began erupting in Tonga, six miles off the main island of Tongatapu, near the small volcanic islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha’apai.
It has formed new land, but its status is unclear:
National Geographic has video, as does Scientific American.
Der Spiegel reports on Alexander Selkirk, who likely inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe.
Archeology is now offering insight into his life on Isla Robinson Crusoe, an isolated Pacific island administered by Chile. Selkirk spent four years and four months entirely alone here after being marooned in the early 18th century.
Queensland, Australia is soliciting applicants to live on Hamilton Island, a resort in the Great Barrier Reef. The person selected will get about $100,000 for having “as much fun as he or she can,” and doing blog reports and photo diaries of his activities.
According to reports, 20,000 people have already submitted video applications.
The “job” is a publicity campaign to promote tourism to the resort region.
Image courtesy Quannum (Flickr)
The Washington Post reports an odd bit of fallout from the global financial crisis: Italy is considering boosting public spending by accelerating the long-discussed bridge to Sicily.
This would be the first fixed connection to the island in thousands of years, since ice-age landbridges were submerged by rising sea levels.
The article notes that Japan’s efforts to spend its way out of recession in the 1990s “produced a herd of white elephants including new, but little-used airports and ports, as well as a $250 million bridge to Kourijima Island,” population 361.
Grant Aldonas, a former American trade official, warns of a general problem: “There is a huge danger of bridges to nowhere.”
Image courtesy NASA.
A reader asks: “I’m looking for a list of all the permanently inhabited islands in the world, their locations, and their approximate populations. Where do I look?”
That is a tough one, as my estimate of the number of inhabited islands in the world is 11,000, including all sea, river, and lake islands. There is no central list of any category of them.
Two places that will capture the major ones — especially large sea islands — are:
The northern portion of the island of St. Martin is now a separate French overseas territory, having divorced itself from Guadeloupe, the CIA reports.
The largest island of this new “country” is the Ile Tintamarre, a desolate-looking island of about 1.5 km sq off the northeast coast of St. Martin.
Curiously, the CIA repeats this error about St. Martin: “the island of Saint Martin is the smallest landmass in the world shared by two independent states, the French territory of Saint Martin and the Dutch territory of Sint Maarten.” As WorldIslandInfo has long reported, there are many smaller ones.
Map courtesy CIA.
A footnote to the story of the quake-formed lake in China: after the May 12th landslide, the lake that dammed up behind it cut off a hillock and made it into an island.
See this picture from the LA Times.
The island will likely disappear shortly, as the lake is drained to prevent disaster.
Foreign Policy magazine recently addressed a topic often linked to islands: how to start your own country.
See this for WorldIslandInfo’s take on the topic. My page deals with some of the problems Joshua Keating touches on in this FP article, such as acquiring land and attracting a population.
(Image courtesy Odalaigh)
