This phenomenon became known as the coastline paradox, and it applies to virtually all borders, boundaries and coastlines with especially jagged, twisting lines – like England's.

"Let me show you what this paradox looks like," said Danny Hyam, a senior geospatial consultant for the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain's national mapping agency.

"This is Britain's coastline at a scale of 1:1,000,000," he said, pulling up a broad, boxy border around the territory on his computer screen. "At that scale, it gives you a [coastline] measurement of 16,652km (10,347 miles). If I go down to 1:250,000, you start to see a bit more detail along the edges, islands appear that didn't before and that coastline is now 22,400km (13,919 miles). If we go to 1:50,000, jetties and more defined inlets appear, and our coast becomes 28,509km (17,715 miles) long. Then if I go to 1:2,500, the coastline becomes even more complicated, and it has now more than doubled in length."

Hyam added, "If I were to go down to 1:1, you'd be going around every barnacle, and suddenly our coastline would become longer, and longer and longer." As he explained, that is the paradox: the closer you look, the longer the coastline becomes.