World Island Info

There is some confusion over the identity of the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.

Elbruz.org has long had a nice piece on recursive islands and lakes, but they get the final one wrong, saying that the island in Taal’s Volcano Island’s crater lake is the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.

That Filipino “triple island” is only about 1 acre / 0.4 hectare.

The largest known island of this sort (subject to further exploration; some Arctic areas are poorly mapped) is the largest island in the largest lake on Glover Island, in Grand Lake on Newfoundland.

Glover Island, the world’s second-largest island on an island, has a many lakes on it, and the largest has about 17 islands. The largest of these is 2 acres / 0.8 ha. When I visited it, it supported its own little patch of woods.

Washington DC’s largest island, the artificial mass known as Potomac Park, is suffering at both ends.

At the south end, at Hains Point, The Awakening, a huge metal sculpture of a giant rising from the earth, has been sold and will be taken away. Washington’s islands will lose one of their most interesting sights.

At the north tip, the Post now reports that parts of the Jefferson Memorial are suffering from subsidence, as areas of the complex sink into the mud that underlies the entire construction. (The island was built up about a century ago out of the Potomac.)

The NYT reports that previously unknown islands are appearing off the coast of Greenland as glaciers and iceshelves retreat.
Explorer Dennis Schmitt discovered in September that what had been thought to be a small peninsula — visible here on Google Maps — is now surrounded by open water.

A few details about the new island:

• Name: informally, Uunartoq Qeqertoq (”warming island”)
• Location: central coast of eastern Greenland, at 71 degrees 29′ north, 21 degrees 52′ west
• Area: roughly 9 sq miles / 23 sq km
• Height: roughly 2000 feet, judging by surrounding terrain
• Discovery: September 2005

Islands emerging from the ice are becomeing more common, according to John Collins Rudolf, the NYT reporter.

• A Danish cartographer “spotted several new islands in an area where a massive ice shelf had broken up.”
• A glacier scientist found that a former nunatak — an isolated mountain surrounded by glacier — now was 10 km out to sea from the ice.
• Another explorer found an emergent island off Svalbard in August 2006.

Rudolf also notes that this accelerated melting is unexpected, and could result in faster sea level rise.  A geoscientist suggests that it might add a foot or two to sea level, threatening low-lying islands.

It could get worse.  Rudolf writes, “Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.”

The Yukon’s largest island is washing away, the CBC reports.

Uninhabited Herschel Island is eroding due to rising sea levels brought on by global warming, the island’s historic sites manager says.

Where is this reservoir island, which appeared near the end of the strange 1970s movie?

The reservoir is in hilly country, with a large, almost pyramidal building near it, probably just above the dam. A cast member said, probably referring to this spot, that it was “down in Orange County,” in Southern California.

[movie locations, filming locations]

A reader comments:

Here’s a recursive island story, probably not unique. When I was 13, I went to a Sea Scout camp on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, Ontario. We wilderness camped there for 2 weeks, and one day, we climbed a steep hill/mountain behind our camp, to find a lake, which was quite warm, and good for swimming. Darned if there wasn’t an island in that lake. I looked around for a body of water on the island, but no luck. Perhaps in a torrential downfall…  Do you know of many examples of this?

Manitoulin has several nice double islands, relatively large for a lake island.

Their are several thousand such recursive islands in the world, concentrated in Canada, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and a few other places.

The largest is Samosir, on Sumatra, followed by Glover Island, on Newfoundland.

Glover is one of the few places in the world where there are islands on an island on an island — triple islands.  I once spent a week there, and camped on a small triple in the center of the island, alone except for the seagulls, and moose that came to feed at the edge of the lake.  It is possible that I am the only person to have slept on a triple island, as they are all quite out of the way.

There is some debate about Teresa Island in Atlin Lake.

Teresa Island is indeed the 2nd tallest lake island on the planet, the highest being Isla Ometepe in Nicaragua.

As for its ranking among “inland islands,” it is the 22nd largest lake island in the world, and thus ranked lower for overall “inland islands.”

I have always been intrigued by ancient islands now drowned under the waves by rising seas.

I was looking at the lovely new Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region, a guidebook by Doris Sloan, and noticed such an island about 20 miles off Point Reyes, northwest of the city.

Between 18,000 and 14,000 years ago, the rising ocean cut off a hill on the coastal plain, forming an island. Animals would have become stranded there, and over the next few thousand years some might have begun to evolve in their isolation. But the island continued to shrink, and by 11,500 years ago had been reduced to a few small islets. They submerged by 10,500 years ago, and the life of the place came to an end.

The remains of the island can still be seen, as Cordell Bank, where divers swim amidst the pinnacles that were the last remains of the island before it was gone.

[geology]

Despite near-universal acknowledgement as a stunning achievement in pork-barrel spending, Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” — which would actually connect Gravina Island to Ketchikan on Revillagigedo Island — seems to still be alive.

It would replace the ferry pictured here, at a cost of some $223 million dollars, at the insistence of powerful Republican Senator Ted Stevens.

The problem is that only about 50 people live on Gravina, and a ferry runs every 15 minutes across the channel in question. Wags have even suggested that you could simply buy every family on the island their own helicopter and still save money.

[Image courtesy of Aaron Headly]

I received this email today:

That is the single most commonly recurring email people send me.

My reply: ” Thanks for writing. Vancouver Island is 42nd; Victoria is in another part of Canada — please see the attached view of my shower curtain:”

That’s not soap scum, by the way. It’s, uh, pack ice. In any case, the curtain did not survive my getting married. [Canadian geography]