The One Minute Geographer: The Alaska Top Ten

Map from Alaska.org

1. A Huge State. Alaska is about one-fifth the size of the continental USA — it’s two-and-a-half times the size of Texas. The dimensions of the state are immense when overlaid on the lower 48. As you can see on the map, northern Alaska would be in Minnesota; Ketchikan, near the southern tip of the southeast panhandle, would almost touch Florida and the farthest Aleutian Islands would be in California! Alaska is the farthest most western state and the most northern state and maybe even the farthest most eastern state, if you want to get technical and consider that a couple of the Aleutian Islands cross the International Date Line and extend into the Eastern Hemisphere.

Alaska is truly a frontier based on its demography. Like the old Wild West there are more men than women. In fact Alaska has the highest ratio of men to women — 110 males for every 100 women, the highest ratio of the fifty states in a nation that averages only 97 men per 100 women. The frontier spirit also shows in people having a lot of kids. Alaska has the second highest birth rate and the second highest ratio of children in the population after Utah. With such a young population it has one of the lowest median ages of all fifty states (36 years old, compared to Maine’s 45).

2) The Last Frontier; The New Frontier