"The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines.
"The measured length of a coastline depends on the scale of measurement: the smaller the increment of measurement, the longer the measured length becomes. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and smaller, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass.
"Over a wide range of measurement scales, down to the atomic, coastlines show a degree of self-similarity, and as the measurement scale is made smaller and smaller, the measured length continues to increase, tending towards infinity.
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