Searching for the Most Obscure Coastlines On Earth

[00:00:00]You can't make this up. If this isn't proof that we live in a simulation, then I don't know what is.

[00:00:07]There are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of coastline on Earth, and surely some stretches of it must form weird, recognizable, or completely unexpected shapes. But, how to find them? If I divide the world's coastline to 50 by 50 km windows and I spend just 1 second examining each one, it will still take me around 9 hours to check them all.

[00:00:33]But, instead of doing 9 hours of manual work, I decided to spend much more time writing a program to do it for me. The first step was to gather as many coastline images as possible. And using a detailed coastline database, I was able to generate around 16,000 black and white images of random coastline sections. And to isolate the very, very few ones that could potentially be interesting, I I used >> Say the line, Bart.

[00:01:11]>> AI.

[00:01:12]>> Yay!

[00:01:12]>> Well, not the kind most people nowadays recognize. Just a simple machine learning algorithm.

[00:01:20]I gave it a list of what I was looking for and what I wasn't, and then it ranked all the images based on how well they matched those descriptions.

[00:01:31]After going through the top results, although most were rubbish, a few did match the descriptions, while others turned out to be interesting for entirely different reasons. Let's see what stood out.

[00:01:49]This is clearly the profile of a face found in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

[00:01:58]And this coastline in Denmark kind of looks like the open mouth of a crocodile.

[00:02:05]And to be honest, those were the only this looks like something coastlines I could find.

[00:02:13]But there were a couple more peculiar ones. Again, we have to go to the Canadian Arctic archipelago to find this fractal formation.

[00:02:24]So so many small lakes.

[00:02:31]But even more so in this part of Siberian Russia. What the beep is this place?

[00:02:39]I have no idea what the AI was trying to find, but I am glad I stumbled upon this.

[00:02:51]Believe it or not, this is not a leaf.

[00:02:54]It's the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana.

[00:02:58]There is something so satisfying about this.

[00:03:04]But maybe my favorite is the next one.

[00:03:08]You can't make this up. If this is a proof that we live in a simulation, then I don't know what is. Who copy pasted this peninsula three times on Russian Sakhalin Island?

[00:03:21]To uncover a few more obscure coastlines, I tried a few other methods, like using reference images with a machine learning model and doing some manual searching.

[00:03:33]But most of the results were not that interesting. Except this one, which maybe is just my childlike imagination, but does it look like Patrick Star? What do you think?

[00:03:48]One very famous peculiar coastline is the Spurn Point on the east coast of England. It's incredibly thin, sometimes no more than 50 m wide, but around 5 km long. Speaking of thin and long, this certainly isn't. This is Cape York, the northernmost tip of mainland Australia.

[00:04:15]Well, if you're aware of any other weird coastlines, let me know in the comments.

[00:04:22]See you next time.