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Title : The Coastline Paradox: Why it’s Impossible To Accurately Measure a Coastline
link : The Coastline Paradox: Why it’s Impossible To Accurately Measure a Coastline

The Coastline Paradox: Why it’s Impossible To Accurately Measure a Coastline

Any coastline. Anywhere on the planet. Keep this in mind when reading AGW claims of shrinking coastlines. Along with the fact that coastlines erode because of water’s natural movement along said coastline. Constantly altering the coastline.

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Try measuring the coastline of the United States, and it's almost guaranteed you'll find a different answer than anyone before you. Even official sources like the a-Congressional Research Institute, b- the CIA, and c-NOAA came up with wildly different answers (a 29,093 miles, b-19,924 miles, and c-95,471 miles, respectively). How could their measurements be so different? Meet the Coastline Paradox.

Which coastline is the correct coastline measurement? 
I choose D! None of the aforementioned !

As explained in this video from RealLifeLore, the Coastline Paradox has been vexing researchers and cartographers since its discovery by mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson in 1951.

The explanation for the paradox is surprisingly simple: unlike human-drawn geometrical shapes, a coastline is full of nooks and crannies made by nature. The more one zooms in on the coastline, the more these inconsistencies multiply. This means that the length of a coastline is completely dependent on what size of measurement unit you use to study it. For example, the coastline of the UK is only 2,800 kilometers long when measured in lengths of 100 kilometers. Shrink that to 50 kilometer measurements and suddenly the coastline is 3,400 kilometers.

Coastlines are like fractals--the further you zoom in, the more complex it gets (famed fractal researcher Benoit Mandelbrot expanded Richardson's work on the paradox). If you were to try to measure a coastline on an atomic level, the length would approach infinity.

This does not bode well for the practical needs of nations and scientists. It also explains some of the bizarre measurements of coastlines that can be found around the internet. The CIA, for example, lists Norway as the second longest coastline in the world after Canada. That's absurd--Canada is 3.9 million square miles, while Norway is only 148,728 square miles. But if you look at the coast of Norway, it's full of wild inconsistencies, fjords, and more. Despite our best efforts, this seemingly simple problem remains impossible to nail down. 

All experiments show that with ever closer inspections, the mathematicians, “straight” lines become obviously ever less straight. — BUCKMINSTER FULLER

  I had actually read previously about the problem of measuring coastlines/mountains (etc., in Stephen Buehner's book- The Secret Teachings of Plants-  Same paradox, entirely different presentation, but, then, that's what makes all this infinitely more interesting

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