We’re often told about something being the size of a football pitch, an Olympic swimming pool or Wales, or the length or size of a double decker bus, or several. In terms of mass, there’s much talk about Afrikan elephants. One such unit is of course the Isle of Wight, shown above in a photo from the International Space Station. In particular, in around 1910 CE, the observation was made that the population of the world could stand on the island. It was later noted, in 1968, that the information was out of date and the Isle of Man would now be required, and that year, John Brunner wrote his memorably titled novel ‘Stand On Zanzibar’, which estimated, as it turns out almost perfectly accurately, that by 2010 the seven millard people on this planet would require the floor space of the East Afrikan island of Zanzibar. These three islands have areas of 381, 572 and 1554 km2 respectively.
Of the various units of area used, the Isle of Wight is not particularly common. From 1974, it became its own county, but it’s long been a familiar and discrete unit, particularly for people living in the English Home Counties. I understand that in the US, Martha’s Vineyard tends to be used. It has certain advantages over “the size of Wales” because that country has a largely politically defined border and there may in the past have been issues with Monmouthshire, a place which totally does my head in but has several significant personal associations for me which mean I can’t ignore it. As far as I can tell, Monmouthshire is now absolutely Welsh territory, but for a long time its status was ambiguous, and I can remember a late nineteenth century gazetteer repeatedly referring to “Wales and Monmouthshire” due to this confusion. Perhaps the issue of Monmouthshire will come up again on this blog.
A more precise definition of the statement that the population of the world could fit on the Isle of Wight is that 2 600 million people would occupy the island at a density of six people per square metre. This number was passed between 1951 and 1952, which is more recent than I expected. The issue of human population being a problem or not is another important matter which I plan to address soon, particularly in connection with the controversial documentary film ‘Planet Of The Humans’. There are cultural biasses in all these units, but this can be a good thing. For instance, deforestation is often quoted to the British in “Waleses”. A Wales, incidentally, is equivalent to 54½ Isles of Wight.
While I’ve been posting stuff about the Solar System, I’ve found myself using these kinds of units, particularly in terms of surface areas although there are some others. For instance, the Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings is about as wide as the east-west distance across North America at its widest point, probably roughly Vancouver to Nova Scotia. To some extent it may help to visualise the scale, but there also comes a point where it becomes impossible to relate to and one may as well just be saying “very big”. That said, it is startling that the maximum possible distance across Titan, for example, is roughly the same as London to Los Angeles, which feels like it’s practically on the other side of the world, and it’s fair to note that this is a slightly confusing statement because it isn’t east to west but across the Arctic, as an aircraft might fly.
Another issue, particularly with Wales, is that “if Wales was flattened out it’d be bigger than England”. The problem with this statement is that if England was flattened out it’d be bigger than England too, and the extent to which something is “flattened out”. Is it supposed to include just mountains and valleys imagined as pyramids or does it go down to the level of irregularities on the surfaces of grains of sand? How attached does a grain have to be to the rest of the surface? I’ve been into this before though.
Getting back to the Isle of Wight, I have the radio on as I’m typing this and it’s just been stated that an area of orchards the size of the Isle of Wight has been lost in this country since 1900. This shows how common this measurement is. It’s probably easier to relate to than Wales because it’s on the lowland side of the British Isles, so the whole flattened out issue doesn’t apply. Other linguistic spheres tend to use small local governmental units, perhaps their smallest such as Saarland, and may differ in that they are themselves not the official languages of island nations and therefore less focussed on islands and coastlines even though on the same scale their coastlines may be longer, as with Norway, so they lack “natural” geographical units of the same prominence. Denmark, I think, tends to use Bornholm. In terms of the “U”K, we have Rutland and Clackmannanshire, but the latter is as far as I know never used in this way, partly due to the 1974 reorganisation even though that’s now past. Rutland also temporarily disappeared at that time but came back in 1997 thanks to an enthusiastic local campaign. It’s a single square kilometre larger than the Isle of Wight.
The island was historically part of Hampshire and is not a ceremonial county. During the 1960s when metropolitan counties were being proposed, there was one suggestion which never got taken on board whereas all other suggestions were: the Solent area was considered as a metropolitan county. I don’t know if it would’ve been called “Solent” or included the island, but if it hadn’t there would’ve been an odd division between two halves of Hampshire, so presumably the Isle of Wight would still have become independent. Incidentally, the Solent area now has a population of 750 000, so it does seem valid as a metropolitan county although it never happened. They were in any case abolished in 1986.
Historically, the island has cultural connections to East Kent, my own original local area. These are the two areas prominently settled by the somewhat mysterious Jutes after the fall of Rome. The Jutes are a poorly-known tribe compared to the Angles, Saxons and Frisians, whose name seems to be cognate with the Goths and Geats (as mentioned in ‘Beowulf’). They’re also rumoured to have suffered a genocide and to have therefore made little contribution to modern English culture although they are responsible for the division between maids of Kent and Kentish maids. Jutes were the maids and men of Kent, so to speak. I’m wondering if they were massacred for refusing to convert to Christianity.
I described Telesto and Calypso, Dione’s coörbitals, as both around the size of the Isle of Wight, but comparing a small celestial body to the island is ambiguous. Does it mean surface area, volume, or perhaps mass? A sphere with a surface area the same as the island would have a diameter of nine kilometres, which is quite a bit smaller than Telesto or Calypso.
This is a geological map of the island. The multicoloured sands of Alum Bay should be enough to convince most people that it’s quite heterogeneous. This varied composition makes it quite difficult to assess its mean density and therefore mass accurately. The Needles are obviously made of chalk, whose density is 2.499 compared to water. It’s tempting at this point to go off on a tangent and attempt to describe the island as if it’s a tiny moon of this planet, but I shall resist that. Nonetheless I do want to know how large and heavy it is.
As usual, I have little idea what’s known generally or just to me, so I may be recounting common knowledge here but if not, in the ‘noughties there was a Radio 4 sitcom which was mainly a parody of television science fiction tropes, called ‘Nebulous’. The central character, Professor Nebulous, has a backstory of accidentally destroying the Isle Of Wight by moving it ten kilometres to the left so it can get more sunlight, killing the whole population in the process and severely maiming one of the other main characters, Harry Hayes. This has made me curious about how much the island actually weighs. In order to decide this, it’s necessary to work out where it starts.
The Solent is between fifty and 120 metres deep and the Isle of Wight has an average elevation of about sixty metres, although St Boniface Down is 241 metres above sea level. I’m going to say, therefore, that the island is a prism with cross-sectional area of 381 km2 and a total height top to bottom of 180 metres. I’m also going to assume it’s half chalk and half sandstone, although I’m aware it also contains substantial quantities of clay. The density of sandstone is up to 2.6, so a fair estimate is 2.55. Hence the volume of the island is only 68.5 km3 and its mass is just under 175 000 million tonnes. By this calculation, more than half of the island is below sea level.
Things can be done with these data.
Make the island a ball of rock. It then has a diameter of five kilometres and a surface area of eighty square kilometres, which indicates how flat and thin the real island is. This is kind of uselessly small for astronomical purposes. Both Phobos and Deimos are several times larger. If the Isle of Wight was orbiting us as a second moon, it would be relatively bright due to the chalk content but also very small. Perhaps people could live inside it in caves. It could have no external atmosphere and its gravity would be negligible, but it could be spun to give it artificial gravity. Unfortunately it wouldn’t do the squirrels much good and the fossil record would be . On the whole it doesn’t sound like a good idea. The population of the island is 141 606, and the question arises of whether it could be self-sufficient as a tiny moon. Perhaps if it were covered in greenhouses full of tanks of algæ. I’m not sure. I imagine the current inhabitants of the island would have something to say about it and wouldn’t be entirely behind such a plan.
As for the real Isle of Wight, I have been there on holiday and seem to remember being there on another occasion. This was in 1976. There used to be schools programme footage of me and my brother sitting on the jetty waiting for the ferry from, I think, Portsmouth. This was in July at the height of the famous drought. While there, I got tonsilitis and ran a fever, as did my brother, although I did manage to visit Blackgang Chine and the dinosaurs. Although it was difficult to find the holiday home, the small size of the island also made it fairly difficult to get lost.
To me, as a child, the Isle of Wight kind of marked the edge of the known world, or rather it was slightly beyond that edge. I was familiar enough with most of Kent and aware that Sussex and London were beyond it, and had visited them many times, but Hampshire and the island were not part of my local sphere.
That’s it really.
A Box Of Chocolates 