Geography Facts That Sound Fake But Aren't

A good geography fact does more than surprise you — it corrects a distortion in your mental map. Most of these come from two sources: the way flat maps mislead us about size and position, and the fact that borders were drawn by people who were not thinking about the people living there.

Size and scale

• Russia has a larger surface area than the dwarf planet Pluto (17.1 million km² versus about 16.6 million).
• Africa is large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Japan and most of Western Europe at the same time, with room to spare. On the Mercator map it does not look it, because Mercator shrinks the equator.
• The Sahara is roughly the size of the contiguous United States, and it is slowly expanding southward into the Sahel.
• Australia is wider east to west than the diameter of the Moon.
• Canada has more lake surface area than the rest of the world's countries combined.
• The Pacific Ocean is larger than all the land on Earth put together, and holds more than half of the planet's free water.
• Alaska is simultaneously the westernmost, easternmost and northernmost state of the United States — the Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian.

Direction and position

• The northernmost point of Africa (in Tunisia) is farther north than the southernmost points of Europe — parts of Italy, Greece and all of Malta are south of it.
• Reno, Nevada is west of Los Angeles.
• The Pacific end of the Panama Canal is southeast of the Atlantic end; ships transiting west actually head northwest.
• Rio de Janeiro is closer to the west coast of Africa than to Lisbon.
• If you dig straight down through the Earth from most of the mainland United States, you emerge in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, not in China.
• Almost all of South America lies east of Florida; Santiago, Chile is on roughly the same line of longitude as New York City.
• The Prime Meridian passes through only eight countries — the UK, France, Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo and Ghana — because most of its length is ocean.

Borders and enclaves

• The town of Baarle, on the Belgium–Netherlands border, is split into around 30 Belgian exclaves inside the Netherlands, some containing Dutch counter-exclaves. Several house front doors have the international border running through them, and which country's law applies is decided by where the door is.
• Until a 2015 treaty tidied them up, there was a piece of India inside a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India — a third-order enclave, the only one that ever existed.
• Point Roberts, in Washington State, can be reached by land only by driving through Canada.
• The shortest border between two countries is about 85 metres, between Botswana and Zambia.
• Spain and Morocco share a land border only at the tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.
• The Vatican is entirely inside Rome; Lesotho is entirely inside South Africa; San Marino is entirely inside Italy.

People and place

• More people live inside a circle roughly centred on Myanmar — the so-called Valeriepieris circle, about 4,000 km across — than live outside it.
• Istanbul is the only large city on two continents; a commuter can cross from Europe to Asia on the way to work.
• Kinshasa (DR Congo) and Brazzaville (Republic of the Congo), capitals of two different countries, face each other across the Congo River and are the closest pair of capitals in the world apart from Rome and Vatican City.
• Nauru was, briefly in the 1970s and 80s, one of the richest countries per capita on Earth, from phosphate mining; the phosphate is now nearly gone.
• Tuvalu earns a large share of its national income from leasing its .tv internet domain.
• There is a single point where Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe almost meet — the Kazungula quadripoint — though whether all four actually touch is disputed.

Climate and physical oddities

• It is possible to ski in the morning and swim in the Mediterranean in the afternoon in Lebanon, Spain and a few other places.
• The driest place on Earth outside the poles, the Atacama Desert in Chile, has weather stations that have never recorded rain.
• The Dead Sea shore, at about 430 m below sea level, is the lowest dry land on the planet, and it is still dropping about a metre a year.
• Because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador is the point on the surface farthest from the Earth's centre — farther than the summit of Everest.