The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2004, Side 18

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 59 #1
ed." And Vancouver Islanders? As far as I
can tell, they're right there between the two
extremes again. Quite capable of being
opinionated, but only to the extent that in
the end no consensus can be arrived at.
At some point in my musings on these
three islands, I borrowed a Japanese atlas to
take a closer look at how their geographic
locations really are related, since this pat-
tern seems to be mirrored in so many other
things. I got out a ruler and put one end of
it over Reykjavik and the other over
Matsuyama, where I live. There was that
graph-like appearance that I had been visu-
alizing all right, but I was honestly quite
amazed when after some time I realized
that the line formed by these two points
passed right through the middle of
Vancouver Island. And I was astonished
when I measured the distance between the
two points and found that the exact center
of the line was there, too. Now, I realize
that this bears no actual relationship to the
real distances or directions that one would
find on a sphere such as our Earth, but in a
sense that only made the coincidence that
much more striking to me. That these three
islands should end up forming a perfect
sequence when translated onto the flat sur-
face of the map that I happened to be using,
was to me almost more coincidental than if
their actual distances and locations had
matched just as well. Aside from that, there
was no getting around the fact that when I
checked their latitudes, Matsuyama's was
34 deg. N, while Reykjavik's was 64N .
Nanaimo, (my usual destination on
Vancouver Island), sits at 49 N, which
turns out to be (I'm not making this up)
exactly between the two. While in the
process of doing all this, I had been reading
a book about synchronicities, (meaningful
coincidences), and this was starting to seem
like it might fit the bill.
Once you start looking at a map with
this configuration on it, you begin to pon-
der all kinds of things. You notice that the
physical area of each island increases as you
go from left to right (Japan to Iceland). At
the same time, the population decreases. In
fact, though I have no figures for the other
two islands, not being countries, the popu-
lation density of Iceland (rounded to the
nearest person per sq. kilometer) is only
three. For Japan (as a whole) it's three hun-
dred and thirty three. It jumps exactly a
hundredfold. In a very similar way, the
hours of summer sunlight increase left to
right, while the average summer tempera-
ture drops. Another point you might
notice is that Iceland is the only part of the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge above water. In other
words, it sits in the middle of the Atlantic,
just where two huge plates of the earth's
surface are splitting apart. Shikoku sits on
the edge (not middle) of the Pacific (not
Atlantic), just where two of these plates are
slamming into each other. Next, the
Japanese Islands are famous for the profu-
sion of different plants and trees that grow