The “largest island” question made me think of one I brought up a few years ago in another universe, and never got a really satisfactory answer to. Quite possibly there isn’t one, but anyway:
I was looking at a map one day, and noticed an island in the Great Lakes with a lake in the middle of it, and an island in the lake. Very simply, what is the greatest number of levels of island-within-island anywhere in the world?
To avoid somebody going out and constructing miniature islands in a mud puddle somewhere, I think we have to say that the islands in question all have to be permanent geographical features that somebody saw fit to put on a map. It can be a rather localized map like a USGS topo map, so we can get down to very small islands. As a subquestion, what if we restrict to islands somebody has seen fit to name? That might be a bit more tractable.
Ground rule: for purposes of this game, we adopt the convention that a continental land mass can count as a first level, so that an island in a lake in North America is a second level island, just like an island in a lake in Madagascar. Among other things, this means that it does not matter whether Australia is an island, a continent, or both.
Ya know, I knew that this would be an interesting thread as soon as I saw the topic line. I don’t have any answers for you, but I think I can help extend the groung rules: First, I think that we need to specify that they appear on “official” maps of some sort, else there’s nothing to stop the same person with the mudpuddle from going inside with a crayon and drawing a picture of it. Secondly, you’ll probably have to relax the requirement of a name: You’d be surprised how many geographical features go unnamed on topo maps. On a canoeing trip my Scout troop went on, we spent one night on a beautiful Great Lakes island, and wanted to find out what it was called so we could visit it the next time we went there, but even on our most detailed maps, the only marking there on the map was a note of the highest elevation. We ended up just calling it Troop 515 island
and javaman, John Dunne said that no man is an island, so Mr. Simon is clearly mistaken.
Whatever you end up with, I’ll bet it’s in Canada in the Shield region surrounding Hudson’s Bay.
There are so many shallow lakes there left from the glacial ages, which flattened the land, that many shapes exist that aren’t possible in other areas.
It’s like funny meandering rivers with oxbow lakes are only possible in flat terrain.
Funny how this thing can lie around for a couple months, and suddenly get some action. Anyway, can anybody beat 3 levels now? That’s the same number of levels under the rules I set as the island that prompted my question (North America contains great lake, contains island, contains lake, contains island). I agree that the pictures are neat, and this is a more aesthetically pleasing example because the outer level is a bona-fide island, not a continent.
But something tells me there’s a more extreme example around somewhere.
