The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..."
While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number.
I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide."
It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.'
I don't think that quote implies a limit for the definition in any way. It just says that this is the count below a given threshold. It doesn't say anything about that threshold being a standard or anything of that sort.
Part of it is based on population density. It is an island if it has a name and someone living on it. Canada has thousands, hundreds of thousands, of unnamed "islands" with nobody on them. Wherever land is relatively flat, every water body will have a few.
Canada's north is so vast that even unique features remain unnamed, such as the "Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island".
The Global Islands database I linked to considers the Delmarva Peninsula ("Lower Delaware") in the US to be an island because of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, so that's not unique to Sweden.
There’s just literally no possible way that Sweden has an order of magnitude more islands than the US or Canada.
Open up Google Earth and scan around northern coastlines of all these countries and you’ll laugh at the premise of this article.
With that said I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the most documented/counted islands. That’s another thing entirely and also sort of interesting I suppose.
It's actually quite an interesting question. The West Coast of the contiguous US has almost no islands, you really start getting "islandy" only in the Puget Sound.
The East Coast has more islands, but then you need to decide how you classify the river deltas. Is a bump in a brackish swamp an island or not?
On the other hand, Sweden has thousands of really small but also well-defined islands. They can be just several square meters in area, but they are well above the water and clearly separated from the main landmass.
California has more named islands than Washington, but they’re not all obvious since there’s quite a few small islands in the San Francisco Bay, Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River Delta. I tried fact checking which of the two had the most total islands between them but couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.
From a practical standpoint, sailing in the Bay Area is dead boring. There's not that much worth visiting. And once you go outside of the Bay, the next interesting stop is Japan. Puget Sound is way better.
It'd be nice to quantify this somehow. I guess one metric would be "navigable rocky islands"?
Yeah I’m talking about more polar “drowned coastlines” which clearly are the place to go hunting for lots of islands. In the US that’s Maine and Alaska especially.
Sweden sure has a lot of islands I’d believe they are #1. It’s the +10x claim that seems suspicious.
It all depends on what you count/map. By some european definition Sweden has 24 islands if you discount all the small ones. We basically have an extreme anount of small ones from the last ice age.
Bit whatever, it’s a great place to sail/visit no matter how you count.
The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..."
While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number.
I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide."
Clearly these are not using the same definitions.
I managed to find the Global Islands data set at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3c... with an explorer at https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ which should have exactly what I want, except 1) it only lists ocean islands, not inland ones, and 2) I can't figure out how to get the data by country.
It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.'
I give up.