Islet

Bangchuidao Island in Dalian, Liaoning Province, China is a typical rock islet

Mōkōlea Rock in Kailua Bay, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, 2.2 km off North Beach, Marine Corps Base Hawaii

An islet is a very small island.

Types

Danes on the islet Danmark in Norway. It is a typical Nordic skerry.

As suggested by its origin as islette, an Old French diminutive of "isle",^[1] use of the term implies small size, but little attention is given to drawing an upper limit on its applicability.

• Rock – A "rock", in the sense of a type of islet, is an uninhabited landform composed of rock, lying offshore, and having at most minimal vegetation.
• Sandbar – An exposed sandbar is another type of islet.
• Sea stack – A thin, vertical landform jutting out of a body of water.
• Skerry – A small rocky island, usually defined to be too small for habitation.
• Subsidiary islets – A more technical application is to small land features, isolated by water, lying off the shore of a larger island. Likewise, any emergent land in an atoll is also called an islet.
  • Tidal island – Often small islands (not necessarily always islets) which lie off the mainland of an area, being connected to it in low tide and isolated in high tide.
• River island – A small islet within the current of a river.
• Motu, a reef islet formed by broken coral and sand, surrounding an atoll.

Synonymous terms

A Tahitian motu off the island of Raiatea at sunset

• In the Caribbean and West Atlantic, islets are often called cays or keys. Rum Cay in the Bahamas and the Florida Keys off Florida are examples of islets.
• In the Channel Islands, they are often identified by the suffix -hou from the Norse -holm.
• In Scotland and Ireland, they are often called inches, from the Gaelic innis, which originally meant island, but has been supplanted to refer to smaller islands. In Ireland they are often termed skerries.
• In and around Polynesia, islets are widely known by the term motu, from the term for the coral-rubble islets common to the region.
• In and around the River Thames in England, small islands are known as aits or eyots.

In international law

Islets involved in ICJ cases

Filfla (1985)

Snake Island (2009)

Whether an islet is considered a rock or not can have significant economic consequences under Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which stipulates that "Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf." One long-term dispute over the status of such an islet was that of Snake Island (Black Sea).^[2][3][4]

The International Court of Justice jurisprudence however sometimes ignores islets, regardless of inhabitation status, in deciding territorial disputes; it did so in 2009 in adjudicating the Romania-Ukraine dispute, and previously in the dispute between Libya and Malta involving the islet of Filfla.^[2][5]

List of islets

There are thousands of islets on Earth: approximately 24,000 islands and islets in the Stockholm archipelago alone. The following is a list of example islets from around the world.

Notes

References

Coastal geography Landforms Anchialine pool Archipelago Atoll Avulsion Ayre Barrier island Bay Baymouth bar Bight Bodden Brackish marsh Cape Channel Cliff Coast Coastal plain Coastal waterfall Continental margin Continental shelf Coral reef Cove Dune cliff-top Estuary Firth Fjard Fjord Freshwater marsh Fundus Gat Geo Gulf Gut Headland Inlet Intertidal wetland Island Islet Isthmus Lagoon Machair Marine terrace Mega delta Mouth bar Mudflat Natural arch Peninsula Reef Regressive delta Ria River delta Salt marsh Shoal Shore Skerry Sound Stack Strait Strand plain Submarine canyon Tidal island Tidal marsh Tide pool Tied island Tombolo Windwatt Beaches Beach cusps Beach evolution Beach morphodynamics Beach ridge Beachrock Pocket beach Raised beach Recession Shell beach Shingle beach Storm beach Wash margin Processes Blowhole Cliffed coast Coastal biogeomorphology Coastal erosion Concordant coastline Current Cuspate foreland Discordant coastline Emergent coastline Feeder bluff Fetch Flat coast Graded shoreline Headlands and bays Ingression coast Large-scale coastal behaviour Longshore drift Marine regression Marine transgression Raised shoreline Rip current Rocky shore Sea cave Sea foam Shoal Spit Steep coast Submergent coastline Surf break Surf zone Surge channel Swash Undertow Volcanic arc Wave-cut platform Wave shoaling Wind wave Wrack zone Management Accretion Coastal management Integrated coastal zone management Submersion Related Bulkhead line Grain size boulder clay cobble granule pebble sand shingle silt Intertidal zone Littoral zone Physical oceanography Region of freshwater influence Category