Indonesia is the largest archipelago nation on Earth. Roughly how many islands does it consist of?
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Answer
About 17,000 islands
Only around 6,000 of them are inhabited, and more than half of the country's population lives on a single island, Java.
How to estimate it
Nobody can derive an island count; it comes from government surveys and depends on what counts as an island. You can only bracket it. The Philippines, a smaller neighbour, lists about 7,600. Indonesia stretches more than 5,000 km, as wide as the United States, across a shallow, broken sea, so two or three times that figure is plausible. The official count is about 17,000 islands.
Source: Government of Indonesia; CIA World Factbook
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