Someone can stand at “Four Corners” and be standing in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Going by the metric of adding the area of all states you are standing in, where would you stand to get the largest combined area?
My guess is:
Anywhere in Alaska
Now, instead of states, what if we go by countries?
My guess is:
On the border of Russia, China and Kazakhstan… with Mongolia just a hair out of reach
Or are there some geographic oddities or loopholes I’ve overlooked? What other boundaries can we go by, state counties, etc?
At the South pole and you can cover territories of 7 countries totalling 5.4 million sq. mi. (14m sq km). Counting the total area of those countries, Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom, it’s over 10 million sq. mi.
Standing on the deck of a boat in international waters in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
That would put you inside a bound area that covers about 1/3 of the Earths surface. (minus the relatively small strips of territorial waters around her edges).
Stand on the shore of any beach on the African/Asian landmass with one foot in water and one on land and you’re straddling the boundary of an even greater division.
Well, the thread title mentions “bounded area” and the OP refers to “states” and “countries”. But the Pacific Ocean is neither a state nor a country and, although it’s a useful geographic term, it’s arguable not a “bounded area”. And, if it is, it is not the largest “bounded area” you could find yourself in.
From a legal point of view, the part of the Pacific Ocean which is not included in the territory of any state is the “high seas”. The high seas are a bounded area; they are bounded by the territorial waters of coastal states. Furthermore, they are a bounded with legal significance, just like a state or a country.
But the high seas of the Pacific Ocean do not stop where the Pacific Ocean is considered by geographers to stop; they continue seamlessly into the adjacent oceans, which include the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. And, through them, the high seas continue into the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic Ocean. In fact, the high seas are contiguous, and embrace the entirety of the world’s oceans, other than the narrow coastal strips which form part of some state’s territorial waters.
It seems to me that if you place yourself at a point where the boundary between the territorial seas of the USA and Canada meets the high seas, you can claim to straddle the high seas, the USA and Canada. (You could do better if Russia’s territorial waters shares a boundary with the territorial waters of either Canada or the US, but I don’t think they do.)
Besides, it hardly matters. The high seas account for about 360 million sq km. Canada and the USA together add about 19.5 million sq km to that. Removing the USA and substituting Russia, if you could do it, would add another 8 million sq. km or so. It’s the spatial equivalent of loose change, really.
Ah, but that particular point links Russia to Alaska - part of the US, certainly, but not continguous with the largest part of the US, even when territorial waters are taken into account. So that would give you the high seas, plus Russia and its territorial waters, plus Alaska and the adjacent US territorial waters. This would not be as big as high seas, plus Canada with territorial waters, plus the lower 48 with adjacent territorial waters.
Also, the calculationa assumes that the Russian island and its territorial waters are not disjoint from mainland Russia and its waters. I don’t know whether that’s the case or not.
The OP asked two separate questions: Biggest combination of states/provinces, and separately, biggest combination of countries.
It seems pretty obvious that any remotely competitive answer to the latter question will be a bunch bigger than the biggest possible answer to the former question.
True, but I also asked about other boundaries, which threw it wide open. I’m glad because I learned a lot of things in this thread about the South Pole and Big Diomede.