Which country has the most islands?

Many countries around the world boast of having the most. Canada has around 879,000 lakes, while Russia has around 45% of the landmass considered a forest.

Which country has the most islands? Maybe Greece? Maybe Indonesia? Canada is the home of the Arctic Archipelago.

Sweden won by quite some margin. According to Statista, a German company that provides statistics, this Northern European nation has over 200,000 islands. According to a 2005 study, the number includes islands as small as 270 square feet. It is about the size of a one-car garage.

Which is more rare: gold or diamonds?

According to Statista, the runner-up has an estimated 188,000 islands, followed by Norway with around 55,000.

The Nordic region includes all three countries. Why does this part of the world have so many islands?

The reason for it is due to them having a particular recent past, according to a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

For the past few million years, Earth's climate has had an ice cap and ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere. She said that before that, it did not.

The Nordic countries have experienced the waxing and waning of glaciers over the last 41,000 years.

Ice ages aren't just an extended period of one temperature. Smaller ice ages, known asglacials, and warmer periods, called interglacials, can be found within large ice ages.

During the last ice age, Nordic regions were covered in mile-high ice sheets, which made the Earth sink.

According to a University of Arizona lecture, the warm period caused the ice to melt and helped the crust to spring back.

The Kvarken Archipelago is the only UNESCO natural World Heritage site in the country. It gains around 1 square kilometer of land each year.

The Nordic countries have a high topography because the mantle beneath the region is very warm.

Pieces of rocks are sticking out everywhere because of the combination of high topography and glaciers.

The global sea level is higher during non-glacial periods. When glaciers melt, the water in the ocean raises the sea levels. The effects can be drastic. During the Last Glacial Maximum, which lasted from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago, sea levels were around 400 feet below their current levels, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Sigloch said that when the majority of the ice melted, vast areas of land flooded with only those random high points sticking out as islands.

How often do ice ages happen?

While geology and climate explain why Sweden and its neighbors have a lot of islands, there is something else that is not quite clear-cut.

Most people think of an island as a swath of land surrounded by water. The world's largest island is dubbed "the world's largest island" by the Britannica, but why is Australia considered a continent?

While there is no strict, comprehensive definition of what acontinent is, the general consensus is that it should lie on its own plate. Because it sits on the North American plate, it doesn't align with the criteria for being an island.

Siglock suggested that the islands of Sweden are not islands at all.

Sigloch said that the islands of Scandinavia are not islands in geologic terms. They are islands because they are so small.

The subject is up for debate, even though it could be concluded that Sweden has won the island contest on a technicality.

The definition of an island in Sweden is narrowed to land bodies with permanent human populations but without a permanent mainland connection according to the author of the 2005 study. Maybe we need to agree on what an island is, a good thing to contemplate on a future vacation to a secluded beach.

It was originally published on Live Science.