Recursive Islands
👇 Get new sketches each week
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 lake - on an island in a lake
Volcano island in Taal Lake - on 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
Also see:
- Strahler Stream Order
- The Droste Effect
- Volcanic Explosivity Index
- The Coastline Paradox
- The three tallest mountains
- Heat islands are a very different type of island
- Point Nemo, the furthest you can be from an island
- Double-landlocked countries
- Isochrones, kind of like travel time islands
- Red volcano, grey volcano
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.
