h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Islands - A3922120
Author: Gnomon - [ 3 stars - back to work ] - U151503

This isn't quite finished in that it needs a concluding paragraph; I'd welcome any suggestions. Other than that, I think it is a good guide to what an island is and how it got there.

What I miss in the entry is the mudbased island I live on.
Many river or lake islands are made by deposting sediments.

Other kinds of artificial islands are polders, areas of low-lying land that has been reclaimed from the water and is protected by dikes.

Kansai International Airport and several other islands are made by dumping large amounts of rock in shallow seas.

Some oil rigs or oil platforms are also concidered islands.

Artificial floating islands are used by several fisher communities to build their houses.

You also need to describe coral atolls as these are islands formed entirely by the erosion of existing islands until the classic ring of dead coral make the islands we can see today...famous ones include most of the maldives, a huge amount of the islands in the pacific and even much of barbados is formed by dead coral...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoll

Thanks. There's some good stuff there I'll have to include. I think I will change the title to "Islands and How They are Made".

Should this be 'continental land mass' rather than 'continent, here? Continents can comprise islands, of course (as you go on to mention later).

Why do volcanic islands form in arcs rather than straight lines? - I dont think I quite understood that bit.

Some other things I found. Use them or discard them, whatever you think fit.

"Island" is the Icelandic word for Iceland.
You can use it figuratively for a thing resembling an island, esp. in being isolated, detached, or surrounded in some way,eg "the university is the last island of democracy in this country".
It's the word used for a freestanding kitchen cupboard unit with a countertop, allowing access from all sides.
In anatomy, it's an area of tissue or group of cells clearly differentiated from surrounding tissues.
In linguistics, it's 'a syntactic unit whose boundaries form a barrier to specific syntactic relations or processes'. (I have examples, but you might not want to know)
This is interesting: Fowlers says that the words island and isle are etymologically unconnected. Island is derived from an Old English word gland, which is a combination of g (itself meaning ‘island’) and land; isle is a reduced form of insula, the Latin word for ‘island’. The change in the spelling of the first syllable in the 16th cent. was due to association with the unrelated word isle.
In zoology, 'island hopping' is the colonization of an island or islands by plants and animals that move from an adjacent island or islands. Birds are particularly likely to island-hop. Over geological time, islands drift away from their areas of origin. The descendant biotas maintain themselves in the ancestral environment by island hopping on to successively younger islands as these emerge.
'The Island' is a poem by Lord Byron, published in 1823. The poem is based on the story of the mutiny on HMS Bounty. It's also the title of a South African play (and probably a few paperback novels too).
Finally, you're not going to believe this, but it's a quarterly Tasmanian literary journal. It was also an artistic and literary journal edited by the British Sculptor Leon Underwood in 1931, and a New Zealand quarterly arts & lit journal (1972-1987). Seems a popular name for this sort of thing.

Icy

Traveller in Time sitting on an island in the office
"Can it not be the words island is more or less derived from isolated land ?

Where in the used context land can also be your desk or your page (on the internet). Any isolated place can be addressed as an island. "

There's the old joke 'No man is an island - except Barry'.

There's so much to say about islands that I'm not going to include a list of other meanings of the word. There's plenty of room in the Guide for other entries about Islands, such as "Islands in Mythology" and "A List of the Biggest Islands in the World".

I think the word 'isolated' comes from the word for island rather than the other way round. Ísland does mean Iceland in Icelandic but that is a coincidence. It is pronounced "eess-land" and means "ice-land".

Island arcs are curved because the plate boundaries are curved, butI'll have to do some research to find out why that is.

- you've made me remember I was going to write 'Islands in Mythology'. I'll pull my finger out once I've written my education pack on SUFE for work. Promise.

Oh, nice Entry btw

Could the conclusion include something about how islands are 'un-made'?

Maybe a little on why they seem to be a tourism ideal, or even a little about Robinson Crusoe type things (I watched QI last night and they were on about William Dampier and so forth).

Just some ideas

I've added an explanation of why island arcs are curved, and a concluding section on the Death of Islands. I've tried to stay away from the subject of islands in the human consciousness, and have kept this to purely geological topics.

I still need to write something about coral.

One word to investigate, perhaps (or is possibly another Entry) -

Atolls

Reminder to self: the sections on mud and sand islands and on coral islands need to be written/expanded.

"An island on an oceanic tectonic plate may be slowly dragged under the ocean as the plate collides with another plate and is subducted, that is, is pushed in under the other plate. This is the ultimate fate of each of the Galapagos islands. After they are created over a mid-ocean hot spot, they travel east until the plate they are on collides with and slides under the South American plate. The easternmost islands of the group are sliding back down into the ocean"

You might want to mention that the Kerguelen Plateau was discovered recently and was a very large island that probably had animals and plants on it about 20m million years ago, until it sank in just this manner.

Fascinating! I'll put that it.

... I'll put that in ...

I've added:

Mud & Sand Islands

Coral and Atolls

The Kerguelen Plateau

Absolutely fascinating and comprehensible
A few things I've found:

>>South Sandwich islands<< - if islands is part of the name I think it should be ' South Sandwich Islands'

>>Iceland is a unique example of where such there is so much magma << - something is lacking here

>>May large landmasses have edges<< - Many

Bel

Thanks, B'El. I've fixed those.

I don't think I've ever read anything about the earth that made it seem so exciting. Perhaps I need to get out more, but this is a really good entry. I now want to visit all these places to see for myself, and this from someone who won't leave the UK because of the dogs.

Well done!