Le phénomène insulaire à l'échelle du globe : tailles, hiérarchies et formes des îles océanes

Abstract

The insular phenomenon on a world scale: size, ranking and shape of the ocean islands. A lot has been said about islands but no global definition of this geographical phenomenon has thus far been made available. A normative approach is consequently difficult to adopt. A data bank of islands was made up with all those in the magnitude 100 to 1 000 000 km2 (1 085 islands). Each digitized file of the coastline is linked to the following information: name, country, basic plani- metric figures (surface, coast lenght), location (latitude and longitude in degrees), scale of the map used for planimetric measurements. From this sampling, a study of the relationship between surfaces and frequencies, highligths a simple statistical law which can be related to properties of a fractal structure. A surfacic hierarchical method is presented to depict the degree and the type of «cephalic» structure of the archipelago. Some coastal form indices are suggested with their significance relating to the morphostructural context of some islands.

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