Up to Continuous Measurements.


How Long Is Australia's Coastline?

The correct answer is .... it depends!

It depends on which source you read, apparently.

SourceLength
Year Book of Australia (1978)36 735 km
Australian Encyclopedia19 658 km
Australian Handbook19 320 km

So who is correct? The answer is: all of them! Each source used a ruler with different sized increments on it. If you measure the coastline with a ruler that is just 1 mm long, you would get a length of 132 000 km!

The article on the next page is taken from The Australian Geographer, 1979 and discusses this problem in a little more detail.


Measuring Australia's Coastline.
Table of Contents