Surprising or just plain weird geography trivia (a follow-up thread)

Among the many tantalizing and thought-provoking posts in Geographical oddities (another thread) (which was started 12-10-2014, 05:11 PM by Amateur Barbarian) there is this post:

Let’s add to that one (here) anything that strikes you as “Wow! I never thought of that” sorts of things that go beyond just garden variety oddities into the truly hard to believe.

It’s up to you, of course, what falls in that category of trivia. :slight_smile:

As an example of some of the gee-whiz stuff you can uncover at The Degree Confluence Project – by referring to this North America map’s page and this Tennessee map’s page I found:

and rounded that to ** 36°N 87°W** or 5.6 miles (9.0 km) SW of Bellevue (Davidson), Williamson, TN, USA
Approx. altitude: 209 m (685 ft)
which makes better sense if viewed on this map (if zoomed out sufficiently) :slight_smile:

{For reference the next “confluence” near my place is this one}

Anyway, using that as a starting point and going due N, S, E, and W to find the first non-USA point in each direction I learned:

N: DCP:
26.0 km (16.1 miles) S of Aroland, ON, Canada
Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic
Latitude: 50. Longitude: -87.Thunder Bay, Unorganized, ON Canada
NE of Thunder Bay

S: DCP: (visit #1)
18.1 km (11.2 miles) WSW of Alfredo V. Bonfil, Quintana Roo, Mexico
Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic
Latitude: 21. Longitude: -87. QR Mexico
SW of Cancun

E: DCP: (visit #2)
20.6 km (12.8 miles) S of Cabo Trafalgar (Cape), Andalucía, Spain
Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic
Latitude: 36. Longitude: -6.Barbate, AndalucíA Spain
SW of Barbate

W: DCP: (visit #13)
2.4 km (1.5 miles) SW of Nakayara, Yawara-mura, Ibaraki-ken, Kantō, Japan
Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic
Latitude: 36. Longitude: 140.常総市, 関東地方 Japan
S of Joso
NE of Tokyo

I’m not advocating this amount of work to locate those surprising geography trivia things, but it is fun!

Arkansas and Illinois are only about 60 miles apart.

If it weren’t a borderline privacy matter, it might be fun to find which Doper lives:

  1. closest to his/her state’s geographical center
  2. closest to his/her state’s population center
  3. closest to his/her state’s high point

(what are some others in that vein?)

See Where Are the Geographic Centers of Each US State? for that first item

And Arkansas is even closer to Kansas. :slight_smile:

Atlanta, Georgia is on the same latitude as Casablanca, Tunisia.

And only differing by an “Ar

:smiley:

There IS a God!

That’s really, really surprising. I’ve spent, like, 35 years of my life believing that Casablanca was a city in in Morocco.