Alaska and Alabama are the only states that start with “Ala”, end in “A”, and do not share a border.
mmm
Alaska has 40 active volcanoes.
Lisa, why aren’t you clapping? Clap for Alaska!
Why are we all getting different numbers here? This doesn’t seem like rocket science.
Wikipedia “Alaska”: 1,717,856 km2
Wikipedia “List of countries and dependencies by area”: It is between #17 Iran (1,648,195 km2 and #16 Libya (1,759,540 km2)
This is total area (may include water).
That’s not so impressive, when you consider that a state can legislate county, municipal, and other local government boundaries arbitrarily. Juneau, Alaska, and Jacksonville, Florida, for example, have boundaries that might be considered appropriate for counties in other contexts.
The actual town of Juneau–meaning the urbanized area–isn’t the largest urbanized area of any state capital.
For some reason that list shows Greenland/Denmark but doesn’t rank it, that should certainly be one more. That would be 17, and maybe including Antarctica brings it up to the 18 claimed in the OP.
Excluding water area bumps Iran and Monglolia above Alaska.
You are correct, my bad.
In my haste I must have compared miles of one with kilometers in the other.
mmm
Juneau has nowhere to expand, other than along the base of the mountains. There’s nothing arbitrary about it. Building vertically is not practical. If you look at a map of the city, you’ll see that there is limited building space, so roads have to be built out along the base of the mountains until a wide spot is reached where homes can be built. I spent the first ten years of my life there, and in the intervening 60 years, the highest numbered street in the original town site is still 7th Street.
Sitka is larger than Juneau. However a fairly large chunk of both are water, not land. Even so, the top 4 cities by area in the US are all in Alaska. If you incorporated just the water part of Sitka it would become the 5th largest city in the US.
Of course it’s arbitrary. Municipal boundaries are arbitrary in every city. There’s no requirement that a municipal boundaries must encompass all the area in which a city can possibly expand. Look at any large municipal area and you can see that the political boundaries run hither and thither and yon regardless of any such situations. In most metropolitan areas, a central city is surrounded by a gnat cloud of little municipalities, drawn not for practical “where can we build” reasons but for “this group had enough power to get a line drawn by the legislature” reasons.
The vast majority of the geographical territory encompassed by the Juneau municipality is not urbanized. It doesn’t need to be within the city’s political boundaries. In many other states, they would likely be part of a “Juneau County” whose county seat was “City of Juneau,” but not included in the City of Juneau’s borders.
Similarly, you could take a conurbation like Los Angeles and New York and see that the municipal boundaries cut through all kinds of socio-economic and infrastructure areas. You could just as logically make them part of a single municipal government, like Greater London in England, which has been redrawn several times to incorporate urbanizing areas on the fringes.
It is absolutely arbitrary.
The population of Alaska, the largest US state, is smaller than the population of Rhode Island, the smallest state.
And related to the Australia comments, do you know what identical thing both America and Australia have in their middle?The letter R.