a blog about islands
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.
Writing in The Star (Malaysia), Yip Yoke Teng describes a trip by the Mastery Academy of Chinese Metaphysics to study the feng shui of Tibet.
They visit Namucuo (commonly known as Nam Co or Nam Tsho, a high salt lake.
Teng writes:
It was evident that all mountain ranges converged on the lake, and there was an island emerging from the centre of the lake. Together, they formed “The Dragon Celebrating Pearl Formation” that facilitated Tibet’s spirituality.
Incidentally, Teng (and other sources) refer to Nam Co as “highest lake on earth,” but there are other, higher lakes, including Orba Co, the site of the highest islands in the world.
Google Sightseeing notes an interesting island off western Kyushu, Japan.
Hashima is small (6 hectare / 15 acres), and was owned by a coal mining company, which housed the miners on the island. Writes Google Sightseeing:
When space for the workers began to run out, they built Japan’s first large scale reinforced concrete apartment block on the island in 1916. More concrete tower blocks followed, and by 1959 the population of Hashima reached its peak of 5,259 — an astonishing 1,391 people per 10,000 square metres within the residential district — which is said to be the highest population density ever recorded in the world.
That would indeed be the most densely populated island known: 227,000 people per square mile, or 88,000 per sq km, surpassing the current record holder, Ap Lei Chau, which houses 160,000 per sq mi / 60,000 per sq km. This is all the more impressive given that Hashima was not connected to mainland Japan by bridge.
The island is now evidently deserted.
The New York Times adds to reports of the disappearance of islands in the Sundarbans of Bengal, “among the world’s largest collection of river delta islands.”
Inhabited islands are eroding away, as the Ganges Delta shifts, possibly abetted by sea level rise.
A readers asks about Burmese geography:
Do you know the land area of the Mergui/Myeik archipelago, off the coast of Myanmar? Land area must include land, lakes, rivers etc., but not seawater. Websites give figures which seem too big, like 36,000 sq km., and probably is not strictly land area, but includes the surrounding sea.
I would estimate the total land area at about 3,100 square km or 1,200 square miles.
Geographical reference sources count 800-900 islands in the archipelago, but the largest (Kadan Kyun) is only 450 sq km / 174 sq miles. There are only about 28 with areas as large as 16 sq km / 6 sq miles, and these 28 have a total area of 2,700 sq km / 1,050 sq miles.
Some caveats: the exact boundaries of the group are unclear, as is the nature of some low, mangrovy islands on the landward side of the group.
Tuva Online recently covered a very rare thing: a Siberian lake island with an ancient fortress.
Near Mongolia but on the Russian side of the border, the ruined Uigur fortress is called Por-Bazhyn, and is on an island in Lake Tere-Khol. The rectangular fortress is visible in satellite photos.
An inhabited island in the Sundarban region of India have disappeared, and their submergence is being blamed by some on global warming-induced sea level rise.
The Independent (UK) reports the disappearance of Lohachara as the first sinking of an inhabited island caused by climate change, and suggests that 12 islands with a population 70,000 are in danger.
While the danger of rising seas appears real, islands disappear (and appear) in this deltaic region on the Bay of Bengal all the time, and it might be hard to pin this particular instance on the small sea level rise that has occurred so far. Indeed, Lohachara might be a char – the Bangladeshi name for the notoriously shifting and often temporary river deposits that land pressure forces desperate people in the region to live on.
A Veterans’ Day query. A reader asks:
Any information on Mapie Island near the Solomons, New Guinea or this general area? My cousin was buried there during the 2nd World War in about 1944:
John H. Carroll, Jr.
Second Lieutenant, U.S.A A.F.
390th Bomber Squadron
42 nd Bomber Group
Died: 12-Nov-44
According to additional information he was listed as M.I.A.
I think this must be the Mapia Islands, north of the hook at the end of the Indonesian side of New Guinea.
The Approach to the Philippines in the series U.S. Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific says this:
The only other important offensive undertaken in the western New Guinea region was the seizure, in mid-November [1944], of the Asia and Mapia Island Groups, lying respectively 100 nautical miles northwest and 160 northeast of Sansapor. Loran and radar stations were established on these islands, which were were captured by elements of the 31st Infantry Division operating under the control the newly established of U.S. Eighth Army. (note, p. 450)
On this page it says that the 390th Bomber Squadron moved to Sansapor, New Guinea on 8/23/44. This page includes a couple of pictures of that unit’s planes.
This history says specifically that the unit was operating against the Mapia Islands on the date of this death, and this site says that on 11/12/44 “50+ B-25s blast Mapia and Asia Islands, New Guinea.”
So it would make sense if he died during that operation, given the date.
Lastly, page 12 of this document includes a picture of a burial ceremony on the Mapia Islands after the American landings.
I like a double island — an island on another — and the Indonesians have accomplished a special one: a mini-Java on Java.
It is the island in the foreground of the lake here, at Taman Mini Indonesia, where the Southeast Asian country is reproduced in minature, all on the north shore of maxi-Java.
Due to plate tectonics, Taiwan is creeping toward the mainland, and the island will unite with the continent in “a few million years.”
Meanwhile, the same article reports that the island is getting rapidly taller: the same tectonic processes are pushing up its mountains at 2 or 3 cm a year.
