Hi Everyone,

I know I'm opening up a can of worms when asking (again) about how many
islands there are in the world. Back in 2004, I asked this same question
and we all agreed it's almost impossible to say because it depends on
how you define an island, etc. Here is what we came up with from that
2004 discussion:

The Alexandria Digital Gazetteer lists 70,088.
http://collections.alexandria.ucsb
<http://collections.alexandria.ucsb.edu/adl_gazetteer/metadata.html>

The inquiry in 2004 was from the Wall Street Journal and they eventually
quoted:

"There are 500,000 to 600,000 islands in existence, says Chris Mayda, professor of geography and geology at
Eastern Michigan."

No one knows where Mayda got that figure from, but hey, it was printed and now it's fact.

Moving on ...

Here are four questions I just got that I still don't know how to easily answer:
(1) Total number of islands in the world

(2) Total number of islands in the South Pacific

(3) Volume of water in the South Pacific

(4) Sea area of the South Pacific

Any ideas?

Angie



Christopher Baruth wrote:
> Can you deal with this today?
>