Are you looking for an island to buy? Or to learn more about the islands on our planet?

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Esri have come out with a web-based tool, the Global Islands Explorer (GIE) and gives the most detailed view and information of the world’s islands.

The GIE allows users to search for islands by name or by zooming in on a map of global islands. The island coastlines can be displayed on top of a number of different backdrop images like topographic base maps, satellite imagery, or an uncluttered light grey canvas. 

USGS ecosystems geographer Dr. Roger Sayre who led the project said the GIE “allows anyone with access to the Internet to explore where islands are, how big they are, and what continental plate they are attached to. . . this is the most detailed data on the locations and sizes of the islands of the world available for free to anyone.” 

As a background, the USGS and Esri developed the new global islands data by interpreting hundreds of Landsat satellite images from 2014. USGS and Esri used machine learning and cloud computing to extract a detailed global shoreline and associated global islands database. 

The Global Islands Explorer tool presently contains information on 340,691 islands, including the five continental mainlands, 21,818 islands greater than 1 square kilometer (called Big Islands), and 318,868 islands smaller than 1 square kilometer (called Small Islands). 

Go here for more information about GIE.