Скачать или смотреть Japan Added 7,200 Islands This Year!

This is a fun one!...

Japan is adding 7,200 more islands to its nation this year (2023).

Japan has had 6,852 islands since 1987. That’s the official number kids are taught in school. Back then, the coast guard did a survey using paper maps. Last year, the government voted to recount their islands using much more precise digital tools, and the result is the addition of 7,273 “new-ish” islands, subject to a final review.

The brunt of the additions aren’t actually new, they were just overlooked before bc it relied on people manually poring over paper maps. But there are some actually new islands that weren’t around in 1987, bc Japan’s volcanoes have spewed out at least a handful in the last 30 years. It won’t change Japan’s territory just its textbooks.


Obviously this all depends on what they define as an island. In this case, Japan mostly followed the UN Law of the Sea, which defines an island this way (as any “natural land surrounded by water which is above water at high tide)” But, they did give themselves limits – they apparently did not count islands in lakes or rivers, and only counted circumferences above 100 meters.

Different countries count their islands differently, so any lists of who has the most are unreliable. For example: the southernmost island in Japan’s current count is considered a rock by Taiwan. Sweden usually claims the title of country with most islands. They count more than 267,000, but that includes basically anything surrounded by water, natural or not. Some places like to split it up: what doesn’t count as an island could be an isle, cay, skerry, or ait. There’s more of them I’ll throw in the blog.

Any which way, it’s clear what country has the least islands. That would be Nauru with one, which is its country.

In the blog, we get into who’s really got the most islands vs who thinks they do. Check it out at AMAPNERD.COM. Thanks!

Thanks for exploring with me. -Map Nerd

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