Types Of Island.....

Continental Islands

Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Continental islands are bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent. Examples include Greenland and Sable Island off North America; Barbados and Trinidad off South America; Great Britain, Ireland and Sicily off Europe; Sumatra and Java off Asia; and New Guinea and Tasmania off Australia.

A special type of continental island is the microcontinental island, which results when a continent is rifted. Examples are Madagascar off Africa; the Kerguelen Islands; and some of the Seychelles.

Another subtype is an island or bar formed by deposition of sediment where a water current loses some of its carrying capacity. An example is barrier islands, which are accumulations of sand deposited by sea currents on the continental shelf. Another example is islands in river deltas or in large rivers. While some are transitory and may disappear if the volume or speed of the current changes, others are stable and long-lived.

Example: Sable Island

Sable Island is a sand bar - 42 km long and roughly 1.5 km wide - located far offshore, approximately 160 km southeast of Canso, Nova Scotia, the nearest landfall. The island has been the focus of human activities, imagination and speculation for roughly 500 years. Shipwrecks, wild horses, seabirds and seals, and inaccessibility have endowed this narrow wind-swept sliver of sand with a special mystique. The island is the subject of extensive scientific research and of numerous documentary films, books and magazine articles.

Sable Island, with a surface area of about 3400 ha, has a topography comprised of beaches, sand dunes, inland fields of grass and heath, and freshwater ponds. The physiography of the island is the result of atmospheric and oceanic influences. The shape and position of the dunes reflect the prevailing westerly wind direction and storm trends. Ocean currents, waves, and tides modify the width and contour of the beaches and change the dimensions of east and west spits.
A variety of plants and animals are found on Sable Island. About 40% of the land surface area is vegetated. Over 175 plant species are found in several distinctive plant communities. These include the sandwort colonies of the east and west ends of the island; shrub-heath and cranberry communities dominated by crowberry, bayberry, wild rose, blueberry and cranberry; and richly vegetated freshwater pond and pond edge communities. In summer and autumn the island is cloaked with lush, green vegetation and wildflowers (including six species of orchid); in winter and early spring the dunes are rather bleak, grey and windswept, and appear deceptively devoid of vegetation. Except for one small pine surviving from a planting near the weather station some forty years ago, there are no trees on the island.

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Sable Island

The Legend of Island....

An island or isle is any piece of land that is completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls are called islets. A key or cay is another name for a small island or islet . An island in a river or lake may be called an eyot, IPA [aɪət]. There are two main types of islands: continental islands and oceanic islands. There are also artificial islands. A grouping of geographically and/or geologically related islands is called an archipelago.

The word island comes from Old English ī(e)gland (literally, "watery land"). However, the spelling of the word was modified in the 15th century by association with the etymologically unrelated Old French loanword isle.

There is no standard of size which distinguishes islands from islets and continents. Any landmass surrounded by water could be considered an island. Under this terminology all the land masses on the planet could be considered islands.

Also, when defining islands as pieces of land that are completely surrounded by water, narrow bodies of water like rivers and canals are generally left out of consideration[citation needed]. For instance, in France the Canal du Midi connects the Garonne river to the Mediterranean Sea, thereby completing a continuous water connection from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. So technically, the land mass that includes the Iberian Peninsula and the part of France that is south of the Garonne River and the Canal du Midi is completely surrounded by water. For a completely natural example, the Orinoco River splits into two branches near Tamatama, in Amazonas state, Venezuela. The southern branch flows south and joins the Rio Negro, and then the Amazon. Thus, all of the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) and substantial parts of Brazil and Venezuela are surrounded by (river or ocean) water. These instances are not generally considered islands.

This also helps explain why Africa-Eurasia can be seen as one continuous landmass (and thus technically the biggest island): generally the Suez Canal is not seen as something that divides the land mass in two.

On the other hand, an island may still be described as such despite the presence of a land bridge, e.g., Singapore and its causeway or the various Dutch delta Islands, such as IJsselmonde. The retaining of the island description may therefore be to some degree simply due to historical reasons - though the land bridges are often of a different geological nature (for example sand instead of stone), and thus the islands remain islands in a more scientific sense as well.

D`Artz : Island