A commercial on TV just now showed a family ‘driving to the easternmost point in the U.S.’
That would be West Quoddy Head, ME (66°57’W). But isn’t Pochnoi Point on Semisopochnoi Island, AK (179°46’E) really the easternmost (which would make Alaska simultaneously the easternmost and westernmost) state in the U.S.?
Depends on your definition of “east.”
Maine is easternmost from the center of the US – the furthest you can drive east from there and still be in the US.
Alaska is easternmost from Greenwich in the UK.
I think the first definition makes the most sense, but it’s all a matter of preference.
One popular answer is Point Udall in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I have been there many times but it is extremely rocky and remote and requires a good hike.
Personally, for any entity which extends a significant portion of the way around the globe, I think that the best answer is either the one based on Greenwich, or that “easternmost” does not exist. For a world-spanning nation (such as the old British Empire, upon which the Sun proverbially never set), one could always find some point locally further east than any point which you cared to name. So the only way to define “further east” in such a case is to start counting from some standard accepted reference point, and Greenwich is such a point, while the center of the US isn’t.
For a more or less contiguous landmass spanning less than a quarter of the earth’s circumference, the general notion of “Plunk me down, I start meandering toward the rising sun and where I stop is the easternmost point” works rather well. Admittedly, throwing in disconnected bits like Alaska tends to complicate things.
Even including all the disconnected bits, the entirety of US territory extends over less than 180 degrees of longitude.
I don’t mean to be snarky but, cite? What are the most eastern and most western points of the US - territories included. Does the sun never set on the US? I’ve never given this much thought.
EDIT: Could we include Iraq?
I’ll throw in with no universally concrete answer but from the perspective of the United States then Maine is furthest east (excluding territories). From a global perspective, the 0 is entirely arbitrary but using the accepted standard Alaska is farthest east.
From the perspective of a credit card commercial trying to create a narrative in 30 seconds without a whole lot of caveats explaining why they had to take four planes and a boat to get their car to the easternmost point for the New Year, Maine obviously wins.
According to numbers on Wikipedia using the widest possible range:
Orote Point, Guam at 144°37’ E to Point Udall, Virgin Islands at 64°34’W which is a span of (if I did my math right) 150°49’.
So no, the United States does not cover 180 degrees.
As an interesting side question, the point of the commercial is that they want to be the first people to greet the sun in the new year. Using that broadest example combined with the tilt of the earth, I wonder if Wake Island, close to the equator is really the place in the United States that will first see the sun that day (the above Wiki page says it is the first sunrise at the equinox).
But Greenwich is an arbitrary point. If 0 degrees were set at a different location, then by that measure the easternmost point in the US could have been in California.
Or consider an island in the Pacific that happened to lie precisely on 180 degrees. If you travel east, you end up at the westernmost point; if you travel west, you end up at the easternmost point. Or, the easternmost and westernmost points are the same location – right in the middle of the island.
It seems very counterintuitive that to reach the easternmost point you have to travel west from nearly any place in the US (without traveling all the way around the world, of course).
Greenwich worked for the British because it was in their territory, and provided a meaningful reference as the home country.
Wouldn’t you want to use a reference point in the US for referencing things in the US?
Greenwich is thousands of miles to the East for anything in the US. You get more meaningful answers if you use things in the US.
So should the U.S. measure latitude from, say Washington, D.C. as the Prime Meridian?
Personally, if the US were to unilaterally choose a new prime meridian, I’d say it should run through Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
No because the lat/long system is global. It’s for referencing global things.
By using Greenwich as a reference point for eastern most point in the US we, apparently, have a situation where you can you can stand at the western most spot in the US then walk just an inch farther west and claim you’re at the eastern most point in the US.
That’s just silly.
What do you define as East and what do you define as the US and from where are your measuring? Measured from Greenwich (which seems arbitrary), the rest of the United States is still further east than Alaska, and the international date line seems arbitrary. Do you mean a territory or protectorate? Or a state? I can stand at any point in the world and find parts of US territory further to my east, the world is round.
So are you suggesting that the lat/lon system is global, except for the U.S.? Last I checked, the U.S. is on the globe. Therefore, when talking about the limits of its states it seems to me that using the globally-accepted standard makes sense. Anything else is relative Where’s the datum? For aircraft the datum is often not even on the airframe. So it makes more sense to use (the admittedly arbitrary, but nevertheless established) Prime Meridian to describe a country’s boundaries.
Ah, I was not aware of the context. In this case, Maine was completely correct, since the standard for measurement is that you cut at the International Date Line. The IDL mostly coincides with the 180 degree longitude line, but it zigs and zags around geographic features, such that all of Alaska is east of it. The first point in the US (excluding territories) to greet the new year would in fact be the tip of Maine.
East and west are relative directions - and when we’re talking about the easternmost point in a country, we ought to be talking about the relatively farthest point to the east, relative to the country itself. It might be necessary to define that a little more precisely for a non-contiguous country, but it’s not sensible to put Alaska east of Maine in the US.
Latitude is used for global reference and navigation. The fact that the labels on it are ‘East’ and ‘West’ has absolutely nothing to do with the using the directions in their relative sense except to the Prime Meridian. It’s merely coincidental if they match up.
In reference to the television commercial, we do have to bother with the International Date Line since it’s a question of when the day begins.
I’m suggesting Greenwich isn’t the best reference point in this case. If you head east at any point in the US you’re gonna hit Maine before running out of US. Then you’ll have to go over two oceans and two continents to hit Alaska. Most of the world infact.
Then you still have the problem of the eastern most point being less then an inch away from the western most point when the country is much wider then an inch.
That’s not quite true. As was pointed out in the OP, the very far end of the tip of Alaska is actually on the other side of the IDL by 11 seconds of longitute. Thus the age old (I’m pretty sure caveman during the last ice age debated this very question) trick question of what is the easternmost point in the United States. My sixth grade teacher used it as a trick question on a geography test (as a reason I loved that teacher he accepted either Alaska or Maine as the answer saying “there’s the technically correct and the not stupidly technical answer”).
Also, this thread is reminding me of a recent xkcd comic.