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Originally Posted by gwross
Unless you're talking about just the coast-LINE, in which case, most of the west coast IS in California.  (California's coastline is 840 miles; as compared to Oregon's 296, and Washington's 157. Source: World Almanac for Kids)
But thanks for the reminder.  We Californians can be a little chauvinistic at times. |
Heh. Alaska has more miles of coastline than California, Oregon and Washington put together. If you include all the west coast, British Columbia has more than California.
I understand your chauvanism (I'm a native Californian and lived there for 40 years), but you need to expand your imagination a little...
This is one of those topics that turned out to be more complex that it appears, by the way. That 157 mile figure for Washington badly fails the reasonableness test. The Straits of Juan de Fuca alone are about 80 miles long. I started digging into this and found
this table from the Information Please online almanac. It repeats your figures for "general coastline," but also includes more realistic figures for "tidal shoreline" which includes islands, inlets, bays, harbors and estuaries. Using the "tidal shoreline" figure, California has 3,427 miles of shoreline, Washington has 3,026, and Oregon has 1,410. If you just look at a map, this seems closer to reality. For comparison, Alaska has 31,383 miles of tidal shoreline. I would be interested in finding out why the first number was reported first, as it seems, to me, to be less reasonable than the second one.
Since this is about science, all you students out there need to realize that shoreline measurements will always be approximations. Because shorelines are practically the definition of a fractal measurement problem, you are bound to get a larger figure the smaller the scale you choose to measure. At some point you would have to be measuring around rocks and sand grains, and would have to have some standardized measurement point for tide levels. Definitions of when an estuary becomes a river are also somewhat arbitrary, but would have to be taken into account. Have fun, and let us know when you've finished counting the grains of sand!