Talk:List of countries by length of coastline

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 29 March 2006. The result of the discussion was Speedy keep.


Hi! Just wondered if anyone can help me- i'm looking for the coastline measurements for MAINLAND USA- i.e. not including Alaska and Hawaii. I see the USA measurement is 19,924km but i'm presuming it would be considerably lower if those two aren't included?

Please email me- esheppard@acpmagazines.co.nz thanks 202.50.245.82 (talk) 01:00, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Fractal measurement

Isn't there a problem in that the more accuraelt you measure the coastline of a country, the longer it is? Tompw 15:44, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, coastlines are fractal. This can be mitigated by taking data from a single source, which will presumably survey all coastlines at the same scale. EdC 02:54, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
No, this can not be mitigated. The whole exercise is meaningless. The order of the countries on the list will be different depending on the scale at which you measure. So to do this properly, you really need to have one list for the 100km scale, 10km, 1km, 100m, 10m, ... An even better approach is to just admit that the coastline has no definite length, and that this whole list therefore is nonsense. Lars Marius Garshol, 4 April 2006
That is true. The lenght of a coastline is not posible to get measured correctly. 195.3.97.222 15:48, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

It can be stablished it dependence with the scale of mesurement. I don't know if is done. It's a linear regression between the logarithm of the length and the logarithm of the scale. Thus we'd obtain the values of the two constants of the fit of Log(Length)=cte+D*Log(scale). If any of you know examples, please tell me. I'm interested on using it for my current Master studies on Coast Managing here at University of Cádiz. --Feministo (talk) 22:37, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Russia

How does Russia ever have a shorter caostline then Norway! You only need to look at the map to see that russsia has a much loger coastline.

[edit] Greenland

Greenland seems to be missing from the list. Since it constitutes rather a lot of coastline I was wondering if it might be a good idea to include it. Celcius 11:48, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Greenland is not the only one that was droped in the recent series of edits [1]. — Instantnood 14:38, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Guinea-Bissau

That must be a mistake? Guinea-Bissau is here listed as having the longest coastline in West Africa but it is in fact one of the smallest countries in west africa. Though I do notice it has quite a lot of islands so maybe when theyre all put together it adds up.. -- Astrokey44|talk 08:45, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

There seem to be other mistakes/different figures too: France is given as 5500km of coast here but is 7329 in this list; Jordan is given as 19 rather than 26.6 ; UAE a coast of 650km rather than 2,870; Kenya 536km rather than 1586km, Canada given as 243,792km rather than 265,523 -- Astrokey44|talk 09:30, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
You're going to find more and more discrepancies of this sort the more you look. Official figures for Norway's coastline vary from 13,000km to 550,000km. Basically you can produce any figure you want above a certain minimum limit (for Norway this would be about 2000km) by choosing the right scale at which to measure. The whole thing is just pointless. See Benoit Mandelbrot's discussion of the problem. Lars Marius Garshol, 4 April, 2006
Thanks Lars, but you are answering to a comment that was stated before the large scale rewrite of the article. Also, your point, was already taken into account when the poll for deletion took place (see template above). I suspect that the CIA World Factbook (which is the source of this article) has not used double standards (ie different scales) for its results. Fmore, the intro statement clearly says: "However, because length of coastline is a fractal measurement, measurements of a country's coastline at different scales will be different - the more detail, the longer the coastline will be. This is why there are different amounts given for a country's coastline." Do you agree? We will be glad to include you as a regular user in WP. Please sign up, there are many benefits and absolutely NO disadvantage. Message me (by clicking the [T] next to my name), to tell you how!  NikoSilver  (T) @ (C) 14:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Countries deleted

Why are some countries removed from the list in a recent series of edit [2]? — Instantnood 14:19, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Like? I see the total is almost the same (195 vs 194). I got the figures from List of countries by compactness, who's authors in turn took them from the CIA World Factbook. I'd be happy to add whichever you want, if you provide a source that uses the same map-scale for measuring coastline.  NikoSilver  (T) @ (C) 00:44, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
To name a few, French Guiana, Netherlands Antilles, Réunion, Bermuda, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico. — Instantnood 15:57, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Correct. That would mean that they are missing from 2 more articles (List of countries by compactness and List of countries by Coast/Area ratio). However, they do exist in the World Factbook (here). Also, there may be some "countries" here that should not be included (hence the almost equal totals). I'll try to check them in all three articles the week after due to Greek Orthodox Easter holidays. I hope it can wait...  NikoSilver  (T) @ (C) 16:51, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks very much. — Instantnood 18:43, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Montenegro

You should switch Serbia&Montenegro into Montenegro only,since Serbia is now landlocked country,all coast of former S&M belongs to Montenegro.

[edit] Spain

The dates for Spain are highly inacurate. The CIA worldfact book have the original mistake at the moment that count only the coastal line of Peninsular Spain but not the coast of the spanish islands. If we follow the National Institute of Stadistic, the official database of the spanish state, we have that the total lenght of the spanish coast is 7921 km as you can see in their official page: http://www.ine.es/inebase/cgi/um?M=%2Ft43%2Fa011%2Fa1998&O=pcaxis&N=&L=0

(see "Longitud de las Costas y fronteras")

So i recommend to correct the dates in this article.

The dates about frontiers should be improved too, the total is 2032 kms.

--Bentaguayre 17:53, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

gahhh... surface of country is not important!

greece is smaller than turkey, argentina than croatia... islands(etc) are important!


[edit] Sweden

Is there no way to get a list that use the same scale for all countries, as one of the points of having a list is that you can see the "ranking" of a specific country. The differences in this list must be extremly huge, since the ranking of some countries is very unrealistic, such as said above Russia - Norway and also Sweden - Estonia.

  • I understand that all the data in the current article is taken from one and the same source; the CIA factbook; which I assume uses the same measurement scale for all countries it describes. It is not quite clear what scale they used, but I assume they use quite a detailed scale, measuring indentations of only a few meters in size or so, otherwise the list wouldn't differ so much from our intuition. Personally I think it would be more useful to have a list with measurements taken at a bigger scale, ignoring details smaller than say 10 meters. But until anyone finds a source like that, I guess the CIA factbook is the best source there is. RagingR2 17:11, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
    • I guess CIA just collected information from different sources. That's the reason why this list has clear inconsistent data and result totally absurd to many people. It's a pity the article was not deleted, as it is a clear example of misinformation. --85.176.22.55 19:42, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sorting doesn't work

The table entries are sorted as strings rather than as numbers, so e.g., 9 > 80 > 700 > 1000000. Shouldn't be very hard to fix this problem. deeptrivia (talk) 23:10, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coastline vs Shoreline distinction

As defined by the Atlas of Canada, there is a distinction between coastline and shoreline, the first being measured on a larger (though entirely arbitrarily chosen) scale and the second being measured on a smaller scale (it sounds like they mean "as small as possible", not realizing that this would make the shoreline infinitely long). Is this something that is used outside Canada as well? And then, even the shorter coastline of the Canadian Hydrographic Service is considerably longer than the figure given by the CIAWF, for which we really don't know what the source is (maybe we should ask the CIA, because if they have just gathered info from various sources, then this list is really pointless). I really agree that if the existence of this article is to be justified, we need several scales alongside each other. -- Jao 10:50, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coastlines are not fractals and their lengths are not meaningless

Well they're not physically fractals. Their length is not infinite, it does not expand without limit, because there's a lower limit on the smallest ruler (sampling length) you can use to measure it. The Mandelbrot paper does not claim they are fractals, but says their measurement empirically behaves like a fractal over a certain range of scales (see paragraph 5). As long as you know the scale used (sampling length), comparisons have some validity and the measurements do have practical uses: the trouble is you can't be sure the CIA figures are all based on the same scale, because it isn't stated.

If your job was to study, patrol, navigate along, construct infrastructure along, defend, provide resources for, or patrol a coastline, you wouldn't say that its length is meaningless. But the measurements are often misused, especially when scale is not matched to purpose. For instance, coastline length is often quoted in the context of coastline security and sea patrols. Politicians and media commentators often link the need for or cost of patrolling the coastline with its length which may have been measured at scale of 100 metres or less. However, coast guard boats do not sail along the coastline, they sail in straight lines some kilometres off the coast and don't need to go up every inlet. The Canadian coast guard boast of patrolling 'the world's longest coastline' but do not have to patrol 202,080 km of it as stated in the table. They could do the job by patrolling a corridor about 10,000 km long some distance from the actual coastline (neglecting the fact that for most of the year they would have to patrol half of it by snowmobile). You can easily check this on Google Earth.

Which leads to the point that a much more useful parameter than length of coastline for many applications and comparison between countries would be area of territorial water or of marine economic zones (using a standard distance from coastline, eg 12 miles or 200 miles). These figures do not seem to be readily available though. Rexparry sydney 14:04, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chile

While coastlines may not be fractals the absurdity of the numbers listed here are illustrated in an excellent fashion by the numbers presented for Chile. Like Norway (and perhaps maybe even more so), much of Chiles coast is made of up highly glaciated land (fiords, islands, etc). If we examine the "official" numbers listed here, Norway has 20X more coastline than land boundaries, while Chile has approximately the same coastline as land boundaries -- NONSENSE! Chile's land boundaries are fairly regular, while it's coastline, especially in the southern 40% of the country are SPECTACULARLY intricate. (Check it out on Google Earth or Maps). Obviously, the coastline of Norway and Chile have been measured with extremely different criteria. So much so as to make the numbers (at least in the case of these two nations) completely meaningless.

You can see an example of what I'm referring to here:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=-51.131108,-74.616394&spn=1.344418,1.535339&z=9&om=0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.254.238.101 (talk) 05:21, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Haiti and Dominican Republic

According to this list, Haiti and Dominican Republic have different land boundaries, while in fact they only border each other and should have the same land boundaries. That must be a mistake. Jakas1 (talk) 19:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)