Did You Know - Islands big and small?

One out of every ten people lives on an island. Of the six billion plus people that inhabit our world, 200 million live in Indonesia alone and some 60 million live in Britain.

Indonesia consists of 13,667 islands of which only 6,000 are inhabited. Britain is the only island that is connected to a continent (Europe) via the Chunnel (the underground rail to France). Of all the islands in the world, the largest is Greenland. You could perhaps think of Australia as an island - it fits the description but it is considered a continent because of its unique plant and animal life. Antarctica is also a continent.

But there are many islands you probably never heard of. The smallest island in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is Bishop Rock. Lying in the most south westerly part of the UK, it is one of the 1,040 islands around Britain and only has a lighthouse on it.

The remotest uninhabited island is Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic and the remotest inhabited island in the world is Tristan da Cunha, which lies in the South Atlantic, 2,575 km south of St. Helena, which is an island a few hundred kilometres off the coast of South Africa. It is interesting to note that Tristan da Cunha has a total population of 242. The smallest independent island country is the Pacific island of Nauru which measures 2,128 sq km.

And last but not least Iceland, ironically, is quite green and unlike Greenland (the largest island in the world), situated to its west, which is covered in ice.