16 Oddities of U.S. Geography

hey there it's Kyle discussing 16 geographic oddities and quirks in the US this is a huge country with all of the follows kind of a uniform a predictable geography but there are several places in this country that really don't follow the rules some of these are pretty odd some are kind of quirky and some are just kind of like hmm really kind of stuff and you may have heard of some of these I'd be familiar with some of this stuff and others you might not have heard of and this is an account and I'm not going to be like oh this one's crazy or the next one kind of thing was just kind of going over some unique aspects of American geography I live in Tennessee so I'm going to start off with one about Tennessee it's one of the strangest shaped States in the country and one of the quirks about the state is that if there are two people in Bristol at the eastern end of the state one started driving north toward Detroit one sort of driving west towards Memphis the one driving north would be in Canada before the one driving West would be in Memphis so just with how wide the state is it's not a huge state and termed a total area but because of the strange shape it really does go really far east to west and that's a good segue to the second one and that's if you are in Detroit and you want to go to Canada you'll have to drive south the southwestern corner of Ontario extends to kind of just southeast of Michigan so if you want to head to the great white north from Detroit you gotta head south something else that's quirky is that the highest point in the contiguous US is Mount Whitney at over fourteen thousand four hundred feet and the lowest point in the US has bad water basin and Death Valley National Park which is almost 300 feet below sea level and why this is so Corky so they are 85 miles apart from each other so in the country there's 3,000 miles wide the highest and lowest points are 85 miles apart that's pretty quirky the next few are based upon the shape of the country so the coastlines aren't directly north-south and the peninsula don't extend the exact same distance so there are some kind of you know hmm kind of things about the latitude and longitude that you might not be aware of one is if it you're gonna start in San Diego California right on the Mexican border and then drive east on a line of latitude you'll end up on the East Coast in Charleston South Carolina I think a lot of folks think that San Diego you know being on the border is gonna be much further south maybe as far as Jacksonville Florida but notes latitude Pro attitude is right even with Charleston South Carolina similarly Deep South Texas extends almost as far south as South Florida so mostly Florida being you know subtropical Miami is way down there but all the folks don't know that Deep South Texas extends just about as far you know the Mexican border right around Brownsville you know you follow up on a lot of to East you're gonna end up in Miami so if Ford does extend a little bit further south than that but South Texas is everybody the subtropical as South Florida's and the third kind of quirk based on the shape of the country is that Reno Nevada is further west than Los Angeles so you think of Reno it's up in the mountains it's near Lake Tahoe it's pretty far inland and your Los Angeles has sitting right there on the coast but you know longitude wise Reno is further west in LA my favorite naming oddity in American geography is West st. Paul Minnesota and why this is so funny is that it's south east of st. Paul and it's not like it's a case where it was originally found in you know the historic part of st. Paul was east there and it just developed west know that West st. Paul when it was founded it was already south of the Stuart district of st. Paul and now at southeastern cities so from a naming perspective I think it's pretty hilarious a couple of placement oddities in the u.s. are that there are two places that are part of US states but you have to drive through Canada to get to him one of them is called the Northwest angle in Minnesota and this is you know an area's part of Minnesota but in order to get there by Road you have to drive through Manitoba to get to it and the other is Point Roberts Washington and or to get to it by Road you have to drive through British Columbia it's a lot closer to Vancouver and much more you know culturally tie it to your British Columbia than this to Washington so those are two pretty unique places in the u.s. that are really kind of more Canadian but they are you know under the US jurisdiction and because I like the word discontiguous I'm going to use that as a segue into this next quirk and that is that there are two discontinuous counties in the US well one of them technically at Paris in Louisiana that's the same as a County so st. Martin parish in Louisiana is discontinuity there are two different parts of it so in order to stay in that same parish you have to drive through another one to get to it and the other one is Norfolk County and Massachusetts which is suburbs of Boston so again to stay in Norfolk County get to drive through a different County to get to it so those are the two discontiguous County parishes in the US the next has to do with city and county nomenclature and how affects jurisdiction and there are some pretty unique ones in the US Virginia is the only state in the country that has cities and counties are the completely separate jurisdictions the vast majority of Americans live in a city that is also a part of a county so for example I live in Chattanooga Tennessee which is part of Hamilton County and before that I lived in Monterey California which is part of Monterey County but in Virginia things are a lot different so they'll have a city that is not within a county so for example you have Roanoke so you can live in a city of Roanoke but you don't live in a county at all you don't live in Roanoke County the two are completely separate jurisdictions and there's no other state that does that the only other places in the u.s. that do that are st. Louis and Baltimore so these are two places they're cities you know the city of st. Louis and the city of Baltimore but they're not part of you know st. Louis County or Baltimore County but this is not something that is statewide with Missouri and Maryland so again everything is the only one does that kind of weird thing with cities and counties being separate and there are four cities in the u.s. that are both cities and counties at the same time so the jurisdiction is the exact same thing those are San Francisco Philadelphia Denver and Broomfield Colorado so these four are the city and counties the exact same jurisdiction so the city boundaries are the same as the county boundaries and these are the only four like this in the US the next has to do with metropolitan areas and how they're defined and most folks know how the metro area populations are calculated because you can't just say the central city of an area is the entire population because say you live in Atlanta it's not just Fulton County it's also Quinet and des cab and Cobb and Clayton and Forsyth and all the other suburban counties or you know if you live in Houston it's you know it's not just Harris County it's also a Brazoria and Fort Bend and you know Gallatin County so that's how every metropolitan area in the country is calculated San Diego California is unique in this the only metropolitan area with a population greater than 1 million in West the metropolitan area is defined as a singular County so San Diego County is a San Diego metropolitan area with about 3.1 million people there are no suburban counties that add on to the metropolitan area in San Diego the other really unique one is Providence Rhode Island it's the only metropolitan area the population raised the 1 million in which the metropolitan area is a state so the state of Rhode Island is the Providence metropolitan area and that's one of the countries like that and because I love me some segue song and heated discussion about metropolitan areas to go into my next work about Chicago think about how big Chicago is it is huge the third biggest city in the country think about the metropolitan areas footprint we got Cook County and Lake and DuPage and Will and Kendall and McHenry you got the northwestern corner of Indiana and Lake and Porter counties and its enormous there are nine million people that live in the metropolitan Chicago area if you live there like we live in an enormous city because he do but New York and LA are twice as big so for as big as you think sir cago is at nine million people there are over 18 million in LA and over 21 20 million in New York so again Chicago is huge but it's way way way smaller than either New York or LA and I'm gonna keep the segue train rolling as I go on comparing metropolitan areas I'm gonna compare Toronto to American cities this isn't really a quirk or an oddity just more of an interesting fact and most people know that Toronto is the biggest city in Canada the metropolitan area for Toronto is about 5.8 million people and where would that rank in the US will be ninth so it'd just be smaller than the Houston Galveston Bay metro area and just bigger than the miami-fort Lauderdale Metiria so if you're wondering where the biggest city in Canada was ranked in the u.s. it be ninth one of my favorite ones is based upon signage and typography and if you driven in the eastern US you might be very familiar with this one interstates 81 and 77 are both north-south oriented interstates that come together in southwestern Virginia and are the same highway for a short stretch and that's pretty common throughout the u.s. they're portions of Indiana and Ohio interstates 80 and 90 are the same and their portions of Pennsylvania were interstate 70 and 76 of the same but that's not unique but what is unique is in southwestern Virginia if you're going north on 77 when they merge you'll be also going south on 81 or vice versa and when you first see the sign you're like what on earth how is it possible that it was just some you know fan don't miss making a joke but it's actually because at this stretch they're going east west so if you're going north on 77 would hit the interchange you start going west if you're going north on i-80 one interchange start going east so and I think it's kind of a quirky you know feature based on topography but see those signs I think it is pretty funny the last two I wanted to mention are based on physical geography and I've mentioned both of these in other videos that's why I wanted to say these four last the first is that the two biggest earthquakes in the u.s. recorded history outside of Alaska have been in Missouri and South Carolina so you think of the biggest earthquakes you're gonna think of the west coast first for obvious reasons but the two biggest ones have been back east in the 19th century there were huge earthquakes in southeastern Missouri and in Charleston South Carolina and these places still have a very large earthquake risk so they have to be careful there but it's interesting to think that the two biggest earthquakes I've heard of Alaska have been in Missouri and South Carolina and the last one that I'm going to mention is just a freaking empty central Nevada is and you know there are so few people that live and just it's enormous area so you can fit the entire state of Maine or South Carolina into this part of central Nevada and there's a grand total of a hundred thousand people that live an entire area actually less than that really but you think about how big Maine is South Carolina are can you imagine only having a hundred thousand people the entire state so central Nevada is just an enormous area with very very few people so that's my list of geographic oddities and quirks in the US and if such a big country you're bound to get some strange stuff like this and some of them I think you're pretty funny and they're all pretty interesting but I don't know I love this country I love some of the quirks of things that make it so unique I hope you found the information in this video useful if you did please give me a thumbs up to let me know you approve and if your interests of stuff about Road chipping across the US and some geography stuff and some travel stuff and consider it subscribing to my channel that's kind of what I'm posting but yeah thanks for watching geographer Kings hunting out about to take a road trip to North South Carolina you

Channel: Geography King

Views: 2,598,616

Keywords: geography now, strange places, odd places, quirky places, weird places, unusual places, road trip randy, traveling robert, wolters world, u.s. geography, geography, geography king, nick johnson, world according to briggs

Id: sS1i25i7_Vk

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/llBvl]

How did he skim over New York City when talking about city/county boundaries? NYC encompasses five whole counties. Each borough of the city is a county in its own right which is unique in the country. Also gives some perspective on how massive the city is.

[u/PotatoesAreNotReal]

I just saw this video the other day! The Interstate in Virginia is funny and a cool fun fact.

[u/kepleronlyknows]

He's also way wrong on the earthquakes one, unless I missed something. Look at the list of largest US earthquakes on wiki (make sure you sort by magnitude), and the New Madrid and SC earthquakes are nowhere close, unless you take the absolute upper bound for New Madrid. But even then, SC is not close at all.

That said, Uncle Tupelo's New Madrid song is one of my all time favorite songs.

[u/aquila94303]

when he talked about the counties around Atlanta I knew exactly where he was talking about after staring at em on NYT for a whole week

[u/GlamMetalLion]

Fun channel. My first map of somewhere outside my area (Puerto Rico) was a US road map, which I became obsessed with after travelling there. Obsessed with American geography, but I wish the rest of the country had the geography of the west with urban and suburban layout of the east (e.g. cities with narrow streets built over natural hills, not so much grids with super wide avenues, having a certain hierarchy to the highways and backroads instead of every road being a 6 lane avenue without curves).

[u/MesabiRanger]

Lots of fun! Thanks!

[u/TBMWolverine]

The map on his left hangs in my room. My favorite deco.

[u/pulanina]

I was expecting “oddities” (like highest and lowest points near each other) but some were perfectly “not odd” things that were in the category of “you might not be aware of this very ordinary fact”, like the southernmost tip of Texas is almost as far south as the southernmost tip of Florida.

Very interesting video though!