How is the Essex Coast measured

[LONG_KEELER]

Essex is believed to have a coastline of 350 miles .

Any ideas how this is measured ?

Has it ever been covered by a boat ?

 

[seivadnehpets]

By a drunkard with a long line?

 

[Poignard]

In the old days I suppose something like this would have been used. Now there are probably computer programmes that do it.

 

[LONG_KEELER]

By a drunkard with a long line?

After a night clubbing in Clacton ?

 

[LONG_KEELER]

I think the ECF should have a stab at it .

Who's good at organising and owns a gun punt ?

 

[Poignard]

How is the coastline defined? Is it HW mark contour or LW mark or what?

 

[pvb]

Essex is believed to have a coastline of 350 miles .

According to a Telegraph article, the Ordnance Survey has decided that Essex has a coastline of 562 miles.

27 things you'd never know about Britain if it were not for Ordnance Survey

 

[Rustyknight]

According to a Telegraph article, the Ordnance Survey has decided that Essex has a coastline of 562 miles.

Thats only 68 miles short of the length of the South West Coast Path covering Dorset, South Devon, Cornwall, North Devon, and some of Somerset.

 

[johnalison]

The coastline of Essex is the same as that of Lundy. They are both effectively infinite due to the fractal nature of the shoreline. It all depends on the length of your ruler if you want to make an approximation, but generally Essex is reputed to have the longest coast in England, or was it Britain, I don’t remember?

 

[Hydrozoan]

I presume that some 'minimum length of interest'' must be associated with any given estimate of coastline length - and that, to be meaningful, it has to be greater than some measure of the uncertainty of position in the dataset used. But a quick search did not reveal what such a length might be in relation to the OS coastline estimates bruited about.

(It did throw up a useless fact that some may already know, but which may be of passing interest if you do not: Ordnance Datum Newlyn celebrated its 100th birthday this year, on 30 April - and Felixstowe was one of two possible alternatives to Newlyn investigated. Prior to that the national datum was first arbitrarily set at 100 feet below a benchmark on St John's Church in Liverpool, and later sea level measurements at the Victoria Dock gave MSL 43 feet above that.)

 

[AntarcticPilot]

This is one of my hobby horses! You can't measure the length of a coastline; coastlines are fractal and the measured length depends on the length of the ruler used to measure it, and tends to infinity as the length of the ruler decreases. So if you state a length, you have to also state the measurement scale. For those who are interested, Benoit Mandelbrot's seminal book on fractals starts with exactly this example.

If you think about it, a mouse following the water's edge would run a lot further than a human walking along the same coast - we cover about a metre a pace; a mouse covers a few centimetres. We miss a lot of the detail that the mouse follows. An ant would see even more detail than the mouse, and so on down the scale. An elephant would see a shorter coast than a human.

There's then the issue of where you define the coast. Is it the highwater line or the low water line? Is it chart datum or OS datum? All these will affect the measurement very substantially. Do you include tidal rivers or not? What about islands - and how do you define them (their distribution is also fractal!)

The clever answer is that any coast is infinitely long; the sensible answer is to say "The coast as measured on OS 1:50000 scale maps is xxx miles long"

It's an issue that I repeatedly had to put people straight about when working on geographic information systems, so much so that I once put a piece in our internal news sheet explaining it!

 

[Marmalade]

I'd always understood that Essex had the second longest coastline - and I think the measurement (notwithstanding it's fractal nature) includes the rivers and islands - presumably estuaries and tidal parts?

 

[pvb]

I'd always understood that Essex had the second longest coastline

That's what the Ordnance Survey believe, according to the link in post 7.

 

[johnalison]

The longest being Cornwall, unless we allow them their independence, in which case my statement in #9 is not the untruth it appears to be.

 

[Tomahawk]

Maldon has the longest coast of any single District in the UK.

 

[ctva]

Maldon has the longest coast of any single District in the UK.

I don't think so. Unless of course your definition of a District is not a council area.

Western Isles. or mainland Argyll and Bute. I think.

 

[LittleSister]

What's a few dozen miles here and there, when we're flying through space at hundreds of miles a second?

 

[AntarcticPilot]

What's a few dozen miles here and there, when we're flying through space at hundreds of miles a second?

But a coastline is infinitely long, so you can cover millions of miles in a walk along the beach ?

 

[tillergirl]

Several questions:

1. When there is a river when does the coastline stop and start measurement again?
2. How long does a rock have to be before it is called an island?
3. Is Sunken Island an island or merely a bank sometimes under water?
4. How many Essex islands are there? Somebody told us.
5. Is the North Sea the newest sea in the World?

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Several questions:

1. When there is a river when does the coastline stop and start measurement again?
2. How long does a rock have to be before it is called an island?
3. Is Sunken Island an island or merely a bank sometimes under water?
4. How many Essex islands are there? Somebody told us.
5. Is the North Sea the newest sea in the World?

1) Depends how you define things.
2) Depends how you define things
3) Depends how you define things
4) Depends how you define things
5) Depends how you define things

?