While on the archipelago the sea is everywhere and so are swimming options.

BBC: Island hopping in Finland

On the other hand, Dubai's architecture of excess is fading fast as a report revealed that the emirate's world-shaped archipelago of islands is sinking into the sea.

ENGADGET: Inhabitat's Week in Green: the power plant you can ski, and NASA's orbiting Nanosail-D

Bacuit Bay, home to an archipelago of 45 islands bordering the South China Sea, occupies a place in the Filipino psychogeography like Alaska's in the American imagination: an unspoiled national Eden that few citizens ever get around to visiting.

WSJ: The Philippines's Strange Paradise

It argued that any military threat to Australia was most likely to come from or through the Indonesian archipelago, which lies across vital air and sea lanes, but that such a threat was likely to be remote as long as Indonesia was stable.

ECONOMIST: Australia: Friends no more | The

Nearly 2, 000 years ago, the indigenous Northwest people inhabited the remote Anthony Island as well as other spits of land that make up the Queen Charlotte Islands, sandwiched between the Hecate Strait and the Pacific. (In the Haida tongue, Anthony Island is known as SGang Gwaay and Queen Charlotte is Haida Gwaii.) The tribes' people, whose population likely peaked at more than 7, 000 archipelago-wide, were Neptunes of the sea.

UNESCO: Culture

The Stockholm archipelago consists of over 24, 000 islands and islets scattered across the Baltic Sea.

BBC: Here comes the sun in Sweden

The Arctic's importance has gained extra strategic and economic significance as melting ice in the polar region strengthens the feasibility of nations to use the Northern Sea Route (NSR) across the top of Russia and the Northwest Passage through Canada's Arctic archipelago.

CNN: China eyes Arctic options in energy, transport