World Island Info

Some long-term thinkers are taking advantage of the nature of islands: they are creating a “doomsday” seed bank meant to contain every kind of agricultural seed on the planet on the island of Svalbard.

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the looming fences, motion detectors and steel airlock doors are not disincentive enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar bears roaming outside should help.

The isolation of Svalbard would hopefully keep the seed library out of harm’s way in even the worst circumstances:

The “doomsday vault,” as some have come to call it, is to be the ultimate backup in the event of a global catastrophe — the go-to place after an asteroid hit or nuclear or biowarfare holocaust so that, difficult as those times would be, humankind would not have to start again from scratch.

Planners even examined what is likely to happen to Svalbard if global warming picks up, and how it would fare in the event of serious cooling due to a Gulf Stream collapse.

In honor the imminent independence of the Balkan nation of Montenegro, let’s take a look at the country’s islands.

For a small state with a short coastline, it possesses a nice assortment of islands, both on its dramatic coastline and in lakes. Many are embellished with historic sites, especially monasteries.

Montenegrin island superlatives
Largest island — There are two candidates of virtually identical size, both about 1.9 square miles / 4.8 square km.

• Ada is a delta island on the southeast border with Albania.
• Vranjina, a monastery island on the northwest side of Lake Skadar, is formed by the lake and the incoming Moraca river.  Vranjina is Montenegro’s largest freshwater island.

Largest sea island — Sveti Nikola is about 36 hectares / 90 acres.

Tallest island — Vranjina rises 296 meters or about 971 feet above Lake Skadar.

Tallest sea island — Sveti Nikola is 121 meters or about 397 feet tall. Second-tallest is Sveti Marko, at 36 meters or about 118 feet.

Sea islands
Montenegro has several sea islands of note in the Boka Kotorska:

• Prevlaka — bridged; 13th century monastery ruins
• Sveti Marko — off Tivat; has a Club Med
• Otok — islet off Sveti Marko with a monastery
• Gospa od Skrpjela — artificial islet off Perast with notable church
• Sveti Dorde — another islet off Perast, site of a Benedictine Abbey

Sveti Nikola is in the Adriatic off Budva, and has church ruins and an endemic species of lilly; boat tours go here.

The most famous Montenegrin “island” is not an island at all: Sveti Stefan is lovely and walled, but now a peninsula.

Lake islands
Montenegro’s lakes are dominated by Lake Skadar (Skadarsko Jezero), in the southeast. It seems to have 50 or more islands; a number are listed here. Monastic islands include Vranjina, Starcevo, Beska, and Sveti Dorde. Skadar also has a prison islet, Grmozur.

Montenegro also has islands in reservoir lakes, including a concentration near the city of Niksic.
[Montenegrin islands, Montenegrin geography]

This evening the TV show “Numbers” mentioned the famous “Seven Bridges of Königsberg” math problem.  Königsberg in East Prussia

included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The question is whether it is possible to walk with a route that crosses each bridge exactly once, and return to the starting point. In 1736, Leonhard Euler proved that it was not possible.

The islands are still there, in Kaliningrad, Russia, though some of the bridges are gone.

A double island — a lake island on the island of Great Britain — has several minutes on screen in the new “Pride and Prejudice”.

It is in the background while Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are arguing in a pillared pavillion, one hour and eight minutes in on the DVD.

The real island is part of the gardens of Stourhead Estate; the pavillion seems to be the Temple of Apollo.

A reader asks: “In my atlas there is a large island at the northwest end of the Lena River delta in the Russian Arctic. It is not named in the atlas, but it appears to be bigger than Vaygach. Have you any information on this?”

The distinct islands shown on some maps of the delta seem to be illusory; see Google maps, which shows a largely unifed delta.

That said, see the map on p. 2 of this paper. “Arga Island” seems largely to correspond with the beige area in the Google satellite view, and could be some 10,000 square km, or 4,000 square miles.

But it’s not much of an island: see these details of the channels that would form its southern boundary.

Virtually the only references to Arga Island online (at least in English) are in the context of that single paper on Nikolay Lake.

This paper has this to say:

The western part of the Lena Delta is formed by a large, 20-m-high sand island fringed by a unique lace coast formed by narrow estuary-like bays deeply penetrating the land. This unique coast undergoes intensive erosion not only on promontories but also inside of estuaries due to storm surges reaching to >2 m height. The sand island is characterized by typical lake-thermokarst relief.

Page 17 of that paper refers to Tit-Ary Island, south of Arga.

Here is a small, real island in the delta, indicating that other islands have names.

So, is there a large island in the northwest of the Lena River Delta? I suppose so, but you can be the judge.

[Russian islands, delta islands]

A reader suggests an addition to the list of largest islands by country:

There we can find a lot of small lake islands but as the biggest island of Brazil is Marajó then also Rusne Island (Rusnės sala in Lithuanian) must be counted. Its territory is 55,56 sq km and it lies between Atmata (Athmath in German) and Skirvytė (Skirwieth in German, Severnaja in Russian, it is the border river between Russian Kaliningradskaya oblast and Lithuania) rivers and Baltic Sea.

Going off to be alone on Sanda, Scotland.  Said incoming island caretaker Charles McVey, “I wanted to do something totally different and can’t wait for the isolation. People say I’ll go crazy and told me not to watch The Shining.”

A dispute has broken out over a tiny double island—an island in a body of water on another island—in Loch Lomond, Scotland.