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Archipelago

    About

    Archipelago is an atlas of the world's island groups. Browse them on the map or in the index, then open a group to see its islands from the major ones down to the rocks, with high points, photographs and the groups it sits inside or contains.

    It exists for curiosity about island chains and the summits on them.

    Reading the numbers

    Published counts are quoted from a source, with a link. Cataloged counts are the confirmed islands in our data. The two are shown separately and often differ.

    Landforms inside a group's area that no source confirms are listed apart and left out of the counts. Unknown figures show as a dash.

    Groups whose largest island is under 100,000 m² are left off the map, the index and search. Their pages stay up.

    Each island is sorted into one of four categories within a group. The same island can be major in one group and minor in another.

    Major islands
    A source's list of principal islands, if it has one. Otherwise the largest islands until they hold 80% of the land, plus inhabited or notable islands at least 15% the size of the largest. None under 100,000 m².
    Minor islands
    Other islands of 100,000 m² or more.
    Islets
    1,000 m² to 100,000 m².
    Rocks & skerries
    Under 1,000 m²; under 100,000 m² and at least 75% bare rock; or named as a rock, stack or skerry.

    Maps label major islands first, then minor islands, islets and rocks as you zoom in. Rocks are clustered until the closest zooms.

    Sources and credits

    • Landforms, areas, high points: the Talus islands kind, from OpenStreetMap land polygons and place tags (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), with heights from OpenStreetMap peaks and the Copernicus GLO-30 surface model.
    • Basemap: Protomaps planet tiles via Talus; relief from Mapterhorn; satellite imagery from Mapbox and Maxar.
    • 3D terrain: USGS 3DEP via Talus where it covers; elsewhere Mapterhorn (Copernicus GLO-30 and national elevation models).
    • Talus islands (OpenStreetMap, Copernicus GLO-30, ESA WorldCover) (ODbL 1.0 / per source)
    • Wikidata (CC0 1.0)
    • Wikipedia (en) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
    • Wikimedia Commons (per file)
    • Unsplash (Unsplash License)

    Photographs are hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash and credited where they appear. Group outlines are drawn around their confirmed islands for display. They are not boundaries.

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