“Where’s the NH sea border?” is almost as confusing as “how long is our coast?”

There’s a legal fight over federal border checks throughout New Hampshire, which led Seacoast Online to wonder how far into the state the “border” is defined. As they report here, the legal definition (100 air miles from any border) covers virtually all of our little state because of the international border on the coast. As the headline says: “Where is the water border? Depends on what you’re doing.”

The story reminded folks at NHPR of a piece they did last summer about the fluid (ha – get it?) border between New Hampshire and Maine, which is somewhere amidst the various Isles of Shoals.

And it reminded me of applications of the “coastline problem” to determine the length of our ocean coastline – which, like all things fractal, changes depending on how closely you look.