Geography Quiz: Major Islands and Archipelagos of the World

Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark lying between the North Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, is the largest island on earth, most of it covered by an ice sheet, and it is a continental island separated from the North American landmass.

Indonesia is a chain of more than seventeen thousand islands stretching along the equator between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Indonesian halves of Borneo and New Guinea as its principal members, and it is the largest archipelago in the world.

Majuli lies in the Brahmaputra in Assam, formed by silt deposited by the river and its tributaries, is a seat of the Vaishnava satras founded in the tradition of Srimanta Sankardeva, and has been constituted a district of Assam, the first river island district in the country.

Barren Island in the Andaman group of the Bay of Bengal carries the only active volcano in India and indeed in South Asia, part of the volcanic arc produced where the Indian plate dips beneath the Burma plate, and it has erupted several times in recent decades.

The Ten Degree Channel runs along the tenth parallel of north latitude across the Bay of Bengal and separates the Andaman group in the north from the Nicobar group in the south, which is why the Union Territory is named for both groups.

The Mozambique Channel is the arm of the Indian Ocean that lies between Madagascar and the coast of Mozambique on the African mainland, and Madagascar itself is a continental island that broke away from Africa and later from India, which is why its wildlife is so distinctive.

Borneo, the third largest island in the world, is divided between the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan in the south, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak in the north, and the small sultanate of Brunei on the northern coast, and it is the only large island shared by three countries.

Honshu is the largest and most populous of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago and carries Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Mount Fuji, so the political and industrial heart of Japan lies on it.

Indira Point lies at the southern tip of Great Nicobar, the largest island of the Nicobar group, and is the southernmost point of the territory of India; it was earlier called Pygmalion Point and was renamed, and it subsided during the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004.

Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea is made up of coral atolls, reefs and submerged banks built by colonies of coral polyps in warm, shallow and clear tropical water, which is why the islands are low, flat and ringed by lagoons, with Kavaratti as the capital.

The Galapagos Islands are a volcanic archipelago in the eastern Pacific, about a thousand kilometres west of the South American coast, and they form a province of Ecuador; the finches, tortoises and iguanas Charles Darwin observed there in 1835 led him towards the theory of natural selection, and the group…