The size of Somalia

[sl8]

Spotted on Reddit.

I was a little surprised.



Also, Saudi Arabia, compared to Greenland:

[Ron Obvious]

1. Africa is HUGE.... n/t

[DrDan]

10. yes - the Sahara Desert alone is roughly the size of the U.S.

[JI7]

21. I'm always amazed by how huge Africa is

Even though i know it just seeing it in maps and especially pics taken from space is really something.

[csziggy]

2. Cartographers for Social Equality - The West Wing

[sl8]

3. That is a great clip. Thanks. n/t

[csziggy]

4. I never watched The West Wing on it's original run

Now I'm watching it on Netflix and wish I'd seen it sooner. It's an amazing program.

[sl8]

18. I concur.

I first saw it about 2 years ago. Wonderful show.

[FarCenter]

5. Somalia is defacto divided into two

The northern part along the Gulf of Aden (formerly Puntland, aka British Somalia) is defacto independent of the rest and relatively stable, although not recognized internationally, since the West never admits mistakes.

The southern part oriented to the Indian Ocean and nearer Kenya, is the part that is a total mess and more or less ruled from Mogadishu. It was Italian Somalia.

It's another bad case of Europeans drawing lines around and between people.

PS - its not to say that Saudi Arabia is so big, just that Greenland is pretty small compared to its distorted size on Mercator Projection maps.

[sl8]

12. Thanks for the input.

Thanks to your response, I read the Wikipedia article on Somalia. There's quite a lot to absorb, even in such a brief summary.

Here is the Wikipedia map of political divisions, by Nicolay Sidorov. Don't know how accurate it is.



Does that jive with your understanding?

[FarCenter]

20. The clan difference are also important

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalis




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_languages

[sl8]

14. WRT the size of Saudi Arabia

Of course, size is a relative thing, but Saudi Arabia is also a little bigger than my mental image of it.

According to MapFight, it's more than 3x the size of Texas.

https://mapfight.appspot.com/sa-vs-texas/saudi-arabia-texas-size-comparison

[Ferrets are Cool]

6. A deplorable sees this image and says...

"dayum, i dint know somulia was so close to Murica."

[snort]

9. Run outside and look up quick! Grab the scattergun!

[lunatica]

11. Whut's Somalee?

Is probably more like it.

[Ferrets are Cool]

13. "Sounds like sompin them dam tree huggin libruls eat"

[Ace Rothstein]

7. Maps we are used to seeing aren't to scale.

The maps we generally see make the areas nearer the poles appear much larger than they are in reality.

[Hortensis]

8. Perspective's wonderful. If only all discussions were

sprinkled with it, an intellectual counterpart to salt, pepper, hot and soy sauced.

Imagine if everyone knew that the global average expected life span is now 76 years, that far fewer babies are dying even as world population continues to grow. That abject global poverty has been brought down to around 10% (so far), again despite population growth, because of human efforts to make it so, AND in spite of distribution of new wealth also creating global billionaire classes at the same time.

Imagine the effect on right-wing anxiety and conspiracies if every American knew that LGBTs are around 4% of the population, Jews half that. And dozens of other lie-busting perspective-establishing realities.

[treestar]

15. I always find that type of graphic

Really helpful. Number of square miles doesn’t do it. But that gives me perspective.

[Takket]

16. Africa should enjoy Somalia while it can...........

Because it won't be part of Africa in a few million years

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/04/04/breaking-up-hard-do-africa-could-eventually-split-into-two-continents/485321002/

'll take tens of millions of years, but Africa may eventually split into two parts.

While geologists have known about this possibility for a while, it became news recently when a large crack, stretching several miles in length, made a sudden appearance in southwestern Kenya following heavy rain.

The tear, which continues to grow, collapsed part of a highway and "was accompanied by seismic activity in the area," said Lucia Perez Diaz, a postdoctoral researcher on tectonics at Royal Holloway, a university in London.

The crack is located in a region known as the East African Rift Valley. It measures more than 50 feet in depth and 65 feet across, according to National Geographic. A rift valley refers to a lowland region where tectonic plates rift, or move apart.

[sl8]

17. Fun site - MapFight

MapFight
MapFight compares the size of any two geographical areas.

https://mapfight.appspot.com

[ProudLib72]

19. Something I learned a couple months ago

Djiboutians identify culturally with Somalians. I had thought they identified with Ethiopians, but no.