I like Island

A lost island off the coast of Moalbal, itself an island in the Philippine archipelago...

Definition

Small piece of land surrounded by water, more or less bristling with coconut trees, which pokes its nose out into the open sea at the whim of the glaciations. A mecca for scuba diving: we're heading "to the islands"!

Synonymes

Island | Thila | Motu | Dry | Island | Island

Starter

Like Cendrars, we all have an island in our heads. A Caribbean diamond, a treasure in the Stevenson…Beautiful island at sea, Château d'If or Frioul islands, the seven islands… Yes, we all remember those clumsy swims to approach as conquerors a modest pebble bordering the coast; treasure islands, those of distant childhood memories.

But which islands are we talking about? Thila in Maldives, Motu in Polynesia, Dry in Mediterranean sea ? Dust of islands dotted on all the seas of the world or emerging as shipwreck reefs: everything depends of course first of all on the level of the waters, eminently fluctuating during the history of the Earth. Didn't people once go on foot in England? When the Planier was only a relief in the mammoth plain in front of what would become Marseille ? Just like the entrance to the Cosquer cave which is now 36 m below the water level of the coves.

So, the Dogger bank of the North Sea was an emerged land just like, beyond the strait of Gibraltar to 15 km north of Cape Spartel on the Moroccan coast, the Majuán Bank which is today 56 m below the ocean surface Atlantic. This probable Atlantis disappeared 12 years ago after the last glacial maximum. Prehistoric men indeed experienced these fluctuations in sea levels and saw oceans 000 m lower than they are today. Followed by the Greeks, the Celts, the Romans and so many others… So many eras and peoples well known for their anarchic industrial expansion and their wild emissions of “greenhouse gases”…

islands or continents?

But where do the continents end and the islands begin? We will return to this difficult problem at the end of the article. Giant islands like Madagascar,Australia, New Zealand,England, Borneo ? Or averages like theIceland, Zanzibar,island of Yeu, Galapagos ? Sicile, Malta, Lampedusa…?

Or the insignificant islets, the barely visible offshore reefs which are nevertheless choice diving sites: Kite, sipadan, Canaries, Malpelo and all these atolls of Polynesia (atoll being one of the rare words in the French language coming from the Dhivehi of the Maldives)?

 

Islands to dive, by the thousands, yesterday, tomorrow, today? Bahamas, Réunion, Maurice, Rodrigues, Green cap, Sao Tome and Principe, Medes Islands ; or the jungle dust planted on their reflections of Raja Ampat, Palau, Salomon…And what about the Philippines and their 7000 islands?

It would still have been necessary to speak, in this enumeration which makes us travel in the climates, the smells, the landscapes, the memories, it would still have been necessary to speak of the fresh water islands set with water lilies, stranded in the middle of rivers, lakes, springs...

In fact, all the famous diving sites offered today in the catalogues of specialist Tour Operators are islands!

Main course

This is usually the moment when, in previous definitions, I indulged in the egotistical narration of a few personal anecdotes from my (vast) experience. This will not be the case here. Firstly, because I have had too many adventures in “the islands”. Secondly, because I cannot choose: I must not offend anyone.

Instead, I offer to your sagacity these elements of reflection that will forever change your way of seeing the world. Yes, yes! To be read with the left hand on the forehead while gnawing the right index finger. Or the other way around.

A question of size

I'll put it here: from what area, what perimeter, what "length" of its coast is an island considered a continent? A simple question, and yet... It all depends on the method of measurement; let me explain. And we must now talk about what constitutes a formidable imposture taught on school benches concerning the famous "length" of waterways, coasts, as I wrote in this learned article...

It is a question of scale. Seen from an airplane, in fact, it is easy to evaluate and compare the size of the islands, “with a wet finger”. When we go back down, for example to human size, equipped with a “soft meter”, it is in principle possible to survey a coast and calculate its perimeter. But what about on an even smaller scale? That of fish? Of fry, of bacteria? Will we have to follow the complicated reliefs around each grain of sand? And obtain insane values, larger and larger? Because the smaller the size of the surveyor, the more the precision of the measurement increases, as does its value, the latter even tending towards infinity when the resolution of the measuring instrument approaches a singularity close to zero. A well-known paradox for another phenomenon in cosmology… There, it’s over, you can breathe. And read again…

In fact, this problem of “rib length” is fundamental and at the origin of the fractal geometry discovered by Benoît Mandelbrot. Indeed this dimension is not whole (2, 3 or more) but fractional; it is… fractal! But this devilry goes beyond the scope of this little article.

Dessert

Diving in the islands is not new. We remember the incursions of Jack Stevens in the Comoros, with his “Voyages dans l’abîme”. Wanderings of the pioneers Lotte and Hans Hass, who in 1939, with Jörg Böhler and Alfred von Wurzian, carried out an eight-month expedition to the islands of Curaçao and Bonaire and the very first underwater film (in color!), or even the first underwater archaeological excavations at the foot of the islet of Grand Congloué in the Marseilles coves by the Team Cousteau.

These islands, which were already the panacea for the first explorers of the underwater world, no doubt because of the mystery they sometimes aroused – Galapagos – Cocos… will never cease to offer their shores, their drop-offs to the pioneers who have become over time webbed tourists, eager to live and remember their adventures and discoveries on the other side of the islands. And you? What is your treasure island?

See you soon for a new definition of Scuba Bécédaire (actually no: the 26 letters of our alphabet are now online!) the irreverent lexicon of diving, but not only. Because sometimes…

Francis Le Guen

Café

Among all these islands where we dive, I have chosen to finish a short extract from our film Septentrion, from the series Expedition Notebooks, filmed in Iceland in the 1°C water of the Silfra fissure. In the depths of an island, between two worlds…