Maps

This map I stole from someone else’s blog helps to show the size comparison of the mainland US to Australia. They are roughly the same size.

What the map doesn’t do is give a sense of climate comparisons. I drew this map overlaying Australia upside down because it’s in the southern hemisphere. Where we live in Chico is nearly the same latitude north as Warrnambool is south, give or take a few degrees. So you can see that a large majority of Australian climate would be more similar to Mexico than the US because it’s closer to the equator. As a former 6^th grade science teacher, I realize that more than latitude determines climate, but you get the general picture.

I suppose I could have drawn the US upside down, but since there are primarily US readers of this blog, I’m doing you the courtesy to put your country “upside right.” It’s a funny thing, map orientation. When you live your whole life viewing the southern hemisphere as “down under” you sort of wonder why everyone isn’t falling off down here. I’m sure there’s a Bill Nye the Science Guy video to explain that gravity thing. (And then there’s that whole phenomenon where the water is supposed to circle the toilet in the opposite direction, but I have yet to see a toilet here that “circles” – most of them just flush straight down.)

If you were to compare the two countries in density of population, you would find that the center of both countries is less densely populated, but huge pieces of land in interior Australia are uninhabited altogether. (I know when you’re driving across the Great Plains, and Nevada, it can feel like that, but it’s even MORE uninhabited.) If I was to map Australian population on to the US (and if the US were a continent and Hawaii was in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska didn’t exist…) it might look like this.

What I really should have done was sever Florida (which many people wanted to do in the last election anyway) and make that Tasmania because the state of Tasmania is not a chain of islands, but one big one, a fairly cold one at that. But none of this is really all that precise; they are artistic renderings with a great deal of license, and I might add, with a US-centric perspective.