How many islands are part of the United States, and by that I mean the 50 actual states; Puerto Rico and Guam don’t count. Am I correct in guessing that Alaska is the state with the most islands, and New York is the state with the most people living on islands?
You’re probably right about New York: New York City (not counting the Bronx) and Long Island have a bigger population than many states.
Interesting question. Here is a list, unfortunately, it won’t be easy to convert without effort.
You might have to define some things: e.g. Florida has the 10,000 Islands, although that number isn’t very accurate. Many of them are tiny.
Yes.
Insular NYC plus Long Island together would be the 11th most populated state (and would drop upstate from 3d to 8th or 9th).
Heck, Manhattan alone outnumbers any of the 12 least-populated states.
I know you don’t want to hear this but it is true. Island questions are impossible to answer unless your criteria are strictly defined and all of those criteria are fairly arbitrary.
The problem is how do you define an island? Is it any offshore land surrounded by water? There are hundreds of thousands of those but most of them are quite small and uninhabited. What about inland islands in lakes or ponds (including the Great Lakes)? Some of those are inhabited.
It is a hard problem sort of like measuring the length of the coastline of the U.S. The number gets immeasurably larger the closer you look.
Just close to home, there are about 6,000 islands off the Coast of Maine alone. A number of them are inhabited but only usually sparsely and sometimes seasonally. Massachusetts has Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket but also the Boston Harbor Islands plus many more including some that are privately owned. The West Coast has everything from Catalina Island to Alcatraz. The list is endless but again, it depends on what your criteria are.
Nitpick: Nighttime Manhattan would rank #39 by population if a separate state. In the daytime it would rank about #28.
The USGS Geographic Names Information System lists the following numbers of named islands by state:
[ul][li]AK: 2763[]AL: 225[]AR: 140[]AZ: 34[]CA: 519[]CO: 12[]CT: 348[]DC: 7[]FL: 1746[]GA: 481[]HI: 148[]IA: 105[]ID: 136[]IL: 328[]IN: 58[]KS: 3 (heh)[]KY: 113[]LA: 469[]MA: 683[]MD: 344[]ME: 1906[]MI: 522[]MN: 585[]MO: 251[]MS: 108[]MT: 115[]NC: 415[]ND: 16[]NE: 70[]NH: 276[]NJ: 214[]NM: 8[]NV: 37[]NY: 911[]OH: 162[]OK: 27[]OR: 337[]PA: 246[]RI: 108[]SC: 387[]SD: 74[]TN: 462[]TX: 260[]UT: 29[]VA: 315[]VT: 78[]WA: 422[]WI: 426[]WV: 60[*]WY: 35[/ul]All told, then, there are 17,954 entries for named islands in the USGS. However, this number is doubtless an overestimate for the actual number of named islands, since some of these may be duplicate entries between states and/or counties. I would feel comfortable saying that there are over 17,000 named islands in the 50 states & DC, but I wouldn’t want to get more precise than that. The top 5 states in terms of numbers of named islands are Alaska (as suspected), Maine, Florida, New York, and Massachusetts.[/li]
For the record, here are the three named islands of Kansas: Stigers Island, which appears to be the land between a former and the current channels of the Missouri, and which may actually be attached to the mainland (it’s hard to tell); Franks Island (ditto, only involving the Kansas river); and Nelson Island, which does actually appear to be separated from the “mainland” by a small creek.
Eventually someone’s going to ask whether an island in a lake on another island (e.g. the several small islands on the lakes of Michigan’s Isle Royale) should be counted, or whether that would be considered unfair double-counting. Let me pre-empt that hijack by mentioning the (non-U.S.) trivia stumper: Vulcan Point Island is in Main Crater Lake on Volcano Island, which is itself in Lake Taal on Luzon Island.
Vulcan Point Island is not the largest island on an island on an island. That distinction seems to belong to an unnamed island in an unnamed lake on an unnamed island in an unnamed(?) lake on Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic.
I bet that NYS also has a high ranking for the number of square miles of islands, since Long Island is long [/obInternetMeme]. Off the top of my head I can think of only Alaska as surpassing it, and am not sure about Florida since it has many islands but small.
Long Island would be the island with the highest population in the United States, with about 7,700,000. The next would seem to be:
Manhattan (1,600,000)
Oahu (950,000)
Staten Island (470,000)
Hawaii (185,000) (the “big island” of the state)
Rhode Island (60,000) (the island, not the state)
Are there any others with a population over 50.000?
Miami Beach FL? 90,000
I’ve now found the Wiki article List of islands of the United States by area, which also gives population. A more complete list by population is:
Long Island (7,700,000)
Manhattan (1,600,000)
Oahu (950,000)
Staten Island (470,000)
Hawaii (185,000) (the “big island” of the state)
Maui (120,000)
Rhode Island (60,000) (the island, not the state)
Kauaʻi (58,000)
Whidbey Island (58,000)
Galveston Island (58,000)
That’s not in the Wiki list – is it a peninsula?
DOH! Forgot about Hawaii. Still, NYS is probably in the top 4 if not 3.
I think the city of Miami Beach is made up of a number of islands, so that 90,000 would be split up by quite a bit.
I think that’s probably the answer. It appears to be several separate islands connected by some causeways and many bridges.
Why don’t Guam, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands count? :dubious:
Because they aren’t part of the 50 states. That was specified in the OP.