World Fact Site

How do you measure the length of a coastline?

I'm aware the coastlines are fractal like, so the length in meters would be infinite, however places like the CIA World Factbook list lengths of coastlines. Is there a standard measuring stick people use? Epidavros, the case you present is a fractal with dimensionality of less than 1. So the length is 0. But with all fractals with dimensionality > 1, the length is infinite. In the case of coastlines, all estimates of their fractal dimension is > 1, hence costlines have an infinite length in 1 dimension.

Public Comments

1. Maybe coastlines are measured by taking sattelite images of them, and then calculating them like that? I don't know a lot about that stuff.
2. A fractal coastline doesn't mean that the coastline is infinite. It just means that the length of the coast does not scale as the root of the land area as would be expected. For an example of a fractal geometry think of a 1 m line which is split into three equal segments and the middle segment removed. This is repeated for each segment left and so on and so on. This is definitely a fractal, and the length of all the segments added up is definitely less than 1 m. Not at all infinite.
3. use a ruler
4. edge to edge