Hello! A fun geography-related sketch this week. This is a real thing.
And this week had a lighthearted podcast episode—Rule number 1 of indoor games: play until something gets broken.
Have a great week!
Jono
What do you get if you have a lake on an island with an island on it? A recursive island.
Visual recursion happens when something contains a smaller version of itself—a pattern within a pattern or a scene within a scene.
A recursive island is a geographical version of this: an island, within a lake, which itself is within an island. Kind of like a nested island, or perhaps an island squared.
But it needn’t stop there. In the Philippines, on the large island of Luzon, is Lake Taal, which fills an old volcanic caldera. Lake Taal has an island called Volcano Island. On Volcano Island is a small crater lake. Inside the small crater lake is a small island called Vulcan Point.
Therefore, Vulcan Point is:
an island in a lake
Vulcan Point, within Taal Volcano’s crater lakeon an island in a lake
Volcano island in Taal Lakeon an island
within Luzon in the Philippines
We can think of these as orders. An island in the ocean is the first order. An island on a lake on that island would be second-order. An island in that lake would be third order. That makes Vulcan Point one of the few third-order islands in the world.
Canada, with its vast archipelagos and watery lowlands, seems to have an abundance of higher-order islands. You can zoom in and out to explore some on Google Maps.
Stream Order
Thinking of islands within islands as “orders” is similar to the Strahler stream order used to classify rivers.
A single new stream straight from the source is first order. When two first-order streams meet, they form a second-order stream. Larger rivers accumulate higher orders as more streams combine. This can continue all the way up to the mighty Amazon, a 12th-order river.
Related Ideas to Recursive Islands
Stream order was my first attempt at creating a gif to explain something, and honestly, it didn’t work great. Too slow! (be patient if you’re looking at it)
Also see:
Heat islands are a very different type of island
Point Nemo, the furthest you can be from an island
Isochrones, kind of like travel time islands
Wikipedia has a table listing islands in lakes on islands in lakes on islands...
I learned that the traditional definition of an island is land surrounded by water that is not a continent. By that definition, Madagascar and New Zealand count as islands, while Australia doesn’t.
HT to my cousin for first sharing recursive islands with me many years ago.
If you made it this far, here’s a timelapse of sketching this. I tried two different options when drafting, several different highlights that I ended up leaving out and just generally fiddled around rather a lot:
This is, as they say, why they pay you the big bucks! Loved it
The largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in North America is on Isle Royal, a national park in Lake Superior. Been there, saw it, didn't buy the T-shirt.