# Should this really count as an island? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 8, 2018, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501 "2018-07-08T00:24:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/81 "2018-07-15T03:22:41Z")
> [@drachillix](#): > > my grandfather lives on Marrowstone Island in puget sound > > [Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps/@48.0515359,-122.7418934,12.94z) > > I regularly refer to it as an Island in Name only. > > Occasionally at high tide the land bridge on the south end has water cross it. I guess if anything, it and Indian Island should be one V-shaped island? ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/82 "2018-07-15T03:43:35Z")
Ŕ > [@Ludovic](#): > > The eastern US is indeed not an island due to the canal nature alone. > > Natural rivers splitting up so disparately like that are extremely rare in nature. I would disallow those handful of examples that do exist… Also Goat Island at Niagara Falls is a legit island because the island ends before the Niagara River drops very much. River deltas and tidal creeks create islands because they have very little elevation drop. What about [Grand Island](https://goo.gl/maps/bKSheLR4jF42), just upriver? ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/83 "2018-07-15T04:03:36Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > The island of Rhode Island happens to be surrounded completely by water. However, the state is “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” making the entire state an island and plantations at the same time. This hardly the oddest thing about the state either. I got the impression that Rhode Island was the islandy part, and Providence plantations was the mainlandy part, and that the state was the combination of the two, and over the years the “and Providence Plantations” part was just dropped from common usage. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/84 "2018-07-15T09:48:42Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > ŔWhat about [Grand Island](https://goo.gl/maps/bKSheLR4jF42), just upriver? On the map it still looks like an island to me: I think it would have to be an order of magnitude or greater size and elevation drop before I started to rethink this. I say “on the map” because the last time I was on Grand Island it didn’t _feel_ like I was on an island, but I was deceived due to the smallness of the Niagara branch I had to cross. The situation I was addressing was more along the lines of lakes which drain into multiple watersheds. I think there is even one in Canada that drains into multiple oceans. That’s where my “elevation” rule comes into play. If the rivers were replaced with identically-sized sea-level straits, then I would think the separate chunks of land to be islands, but since they are downward-flowing rivers, I don’t consider the pieces of land cut off from each other. ---
**Author:** ![merrick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@merrick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/merrick)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/85 "2018-07-15T11:10:49Z")
**glowacks** - good call on the Casiquiare Canal (which I’d never heard of). I agree that’s a tough one - it’s all-natural (unlike the Chicago River), navigable and permanent, yet, as you say, no-one has ever claimed that north-eastern South America is an island because of it. On the other hand I note that no-one has challenged Rene-Levasseur Island. I contend that it meets **SlackerInc’s** definition of “looks like an island on the map” - if you set the scale to show the whole island, you can see a clearly-defined boundary ring of water around it, even though the water is much narrower than the island. But the we’re back in the game of arbitrary definitions - if Grand Island is an island, then is [Alney Island](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8771828,-2.2601845,14.5z) an island? If not, what is the fundamental distinction? While I was looking up Rene-Levasseur I found a reference to [Soisalo](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Soisalo/@62.4429801,28.1934946,9.7z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x469b229285560d33:0x18699477a97c16cd!8m2!3d62.383333!4d28.216667?hl=en-US) “generally considered to be Finland’s largest island” - and yes, it took me about 10 minutes with Google Maps to find the boundary. The whole Finnish lakeland is designed to drive hydrographers insane - there are thousands of (often-interlinked) lakes, multiple bifurcations some of which ultimately reach the sea hundreds of miles apart and the whole thing merges into the Baltic via the Turku archipelago - and good luck defining where the mainland ends and the archipelago starts. So any definition we come up with is going to fail for pathological edge cases. The fact that there’s no English word for “a piece of land completely surrounded by rivers (or lakes)” other than “island” suggests that anyone who has ever defined such places has defined them as islands. If they aren’t islands, what would you call them? ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2018, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501/86 "2018-07-15T14:23:34Z")
The more I think about it, the more I like Ludovic’s definition, although applied more tightly. If the water all around a piece of land is at the same level, it’s an island—even in cases (which probably aren’t that numerous) where it fails my eye test. Put another way: if it’s a legit island, it should be possible conceptually to remove all water from the world and then fill it back in, starting from the deepest trenches of the ocean, and at some point as “sea level” rises (without the water cycle of precipitation and evaporation) the island in question should be visible with the exact same shape. In the case of “islands” which are sections of mainland bounded by rivers, this will almost never be the case. And then we don’t have to call Finland an archipelago. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/should-this-really-count-as-an-island/817501.md?page=4)