Скачать или смотреть The Coastline Paradox. There is No Longest Coast!

A few videos ago I made a comment that you can’t actually know how long a coast is. Then someone said that Massachusetts has the longest coastline in the US, which seems weird considering its 1/20th the size of California. Are they wrong? Not really. But they’re not right either.

This is the curious problem with measuring coastlines, or in fact measuring anything on a map that follows something natural like a river or a mountain ridge…

They are as long or as short as you want them to be, just depends on how much you want to zoom in!

It’s called the coastline paradox and it makes sense if you think about it: natural features like coasts have an infinite amount of nooks, crannies, curves, and edges. The scale at which you choose to measure it determines its size.

Out here, Britain’s coast is 2800 km long measured at 100km units, but choose to measure the same coast with 50km units, and it’s now 3400 km long. It’s the same physical coastline, and neither measurement is officially “more accurate.”

In fact, unlike mm on a ruler or milliseconds on a stopwatch, a closer measurement of a coastline does not get closer to the truth, it only increases length, and theoretically it never stops increasing.

Therefore I say all coastlines are 100km long, take that Canada! 💪