Japanese geographers describe the local islands and expect their numbers to nearly double in the future.
Japan last counted its islands in 1987. Then the calculation was made by the Japanese Coast Guard – Kyodo News writes that only islands with a circumference of at least 100 meters are taken into account in the statistics.
Coast Guard officials at the time manually counted literally all the Japanese islands – for this they used basic technology, often mistakenly identifying small groups of islands as a single island. In addition, hundreds of islands in lakes or rivers were not taken into account in the calculation. Also, the statistics did not take into account riverbanks, which the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea no longer recognizes as islands.
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But if that’s not all, when the Japanese islands were last counted 35 years ago, volcanic activity during this time resulted in the formation of a large number of islands. All this prompted Japan’s local authorities to conduct an updated “island census”.
This time, the islands will not be counted by the Coast Guard, but by geographers using cutting-edge technology to “count”. According to local authorities, understanding the exact number of islands is an important administrative matter of national interest.
This time, geographers used advanced cartographic technologies to recalculate and cross-reference past aerial photographs. As in the 1987 study, islands with a circumference of less than 100 meters were not taken into account in the calculation.
While the number of Japanese islands continues and therefore the final figure may vary, preliminary data from geographers suggests that Japan will have around 7,000 new islands. By comparison, only 6,852 candidates were counted in 1987, but that number is now expected to rise to 14,125. The final figure will be announced in March 2023.
However, despite the huge increase in the number of islands, the discovery of 7,000 previously unknown pieces of land is unfortunately unlikely to change the size of Japan’s land or waters.
Previously Focus He wrote that a new island had emerged in the rapidly growing Pacific Ocean.
Source: Focus
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