If I’m reading your test right (surrounding waters must be wider than the island is long in two separate directions), I’ll start with Manhattan, and if you’re claiming Manhattan isn’t an island I’ll continue with the Island of Bute in Scotland - sea on all sides, you need a ferry to get there, but except for dead south, none of the straits around it are wider than the long axis of the island and a lot of them are narrower than the short axis.
The island of Fyn in Denmark is similar. Then there’s Rene-Levasseur Island in Lake Manicoagan.
I’m sure you could tweak your definition to let things like these in, but then it would likely start including things you want to leave out.
Yeah, I’d be interested. Does it have to do with it not being an island all by itself? Because it’s located ON an island but it shares the geographical island with Brooklyn and Queens. Myself, I think of Long Island as an island comprised of the counties of Kings, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk.
And for those that aren’t familiar , here’s a map of Manhattan - note the similarities to the picture of SugarcIsland.
First, kudos for putting up examples instead of just claiming generalities. And you’re right: some tweaks are probably in order. For me, that was clearest in your Scottish example. But the easiest tweak that takes care of that is to say that if you can’t get to it except by ferry, then fine: you’re an island regardless of other criteria.
The others, I really don’t think need to be considered islands. Although the funny thing is that although the Danish one, to me, is a peninsula that happens to have a little river or inlet running through it, I think it actually would qualify as an island based on my earlier criteria: there are a couple directons you could aim a boat and go pretty far without hitting land (even leaving aside the question of whether running into a little island counts).
Basically, to me an island is commonsensically something you could look at on Google Earth and at a certain level of zoom, see just the land of the island and otherwise the rectangle contains blue. Or maybe there are a few much smaller islands within the blue, or there is the tip of some larger piece of land (whether a bigger island or the “mainland”) just visible in one corner. These are not hard and fast definitions, I realize, but they convey a sense of what I’m trying to define.
I unintentionally found something very interesting* just now when looking at coastal Maine for examples of “islandy” islands and others not so much so. There are lots of nice examples of the former in that area, but zooming in I found a great example of one I’d disallow. I couldn’t find a label naming the island, but I noted that the town of Hancock lies on it, just across a bridge on Route 1.
But the interesting part came in when I put Hancock into Google Maps so as to get a link to share. The description there says it is “on the mainland, with good views of Mt. Desert Island”! Well, blow me down. By the “water on all sides” definition, it clearly qualifies; so how interesting to know that someone either in that region, or at Google, or both, is calling bullshit on something like this being an “island” just because you have to walk or drive across a short bridge to get to it.
*Interesting to those of us who enjoy geeking out on this stuff, from either/any side of the argument.
Great question. Looking into it, I realize that by “geographical center” I’m not really meaning the centroid of the geometric outline but the “pole of inaccessibility”: Pole of inaccessibility - Wikipedia Basically, the part of the island (or island candidate) that is furthest from any coastline.
Submitted for your approval: Grand Island, Nebraska, a town named after an island formed by a river that bifurcated into two rivers and rejoined 40 miles later. When I learned about this, my reaction was, “Huh? That counts as an island?” Apparently I was mistaken about the definition of “island,” but it still sounds dubious to me.
To add insult to injury, one of those rivers was dammed up ages ago and the island no longer exists, but the town kept the name anyway because hey, cool name.
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of place we need to wipe off the “island” chart. You’re on a part of the mainland surrounded by rivers, not on an “island”. I’m okay with people calling something like that an “island” in a sort of cheeky way, as long as everyone understands that it’s a far cry from Saint Helena.
I’m guessing you’re also going to disallow calling a large chunk of South America being called an island, as in fact the chunk of land has no common name. I’m talking about a northern chunk of Brazil, the Guyanas, and half of Venezuela that are surrounded entirely by water because of the Casiquiare canal - Wikipedia - a natural distributary of the Upper Orinoco that ends up in the Amazon river system, meaning you can go up the Amazon one route and then down the Orinoco and back around to the mouth of the Amazon from the other direction via the Atlantic Ocean without leaving water, making what you have circumnavigated an island by some pedantic definitions.
Oh, and the eastern half of the US along with a portion of the maritimes of Canada is also an island because of the outlet of Lake Michigan into the Chicago River that flows into the Mississippi.
Great finds, glowacks! Perfect illustration of the reductio ad absurdem the “surrounded by water” definition creates.
Does anyone want to defend the idea that either of those is an island? (If you’re disallowing the South American one because of the canal, pretend that’s a natural river and tell me if it would be an island in such a case.)
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. The rule for me is how much the separate streams drop in elevation before the end of the island. The example of the OP does not drop enough IMO. 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.
The court case didn’t actually rule that Long Island is not a geographical island, and there wasn’t really any dispute over whether it is an island. The dispute was about where the coastline is for the purpose of determining jurisdiction over the water and seabed. It’s full of quotes like this :
“An island which should be treated as an extension of the mainland” is still an island.
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.