Always wondered about Chile. Not even 20M people on all that land and coastline. Hopped on Google maps and now I get it, or get more than I did.
The southern third is wildly inhospitable for settlements. Any city or town would be cut off from everywhere. Never seen land so fractured. Waterways, lakes and ocean inlets dice it into small (and tall!) puzzle pieces, looks like the continental equivalent of an accordioned car. Building roads and bridges would be a nightmare for both expense and logistics. Not to mention, the very southern tip is next door to Antarctica. Take a look and zoom around, wild country. Wonder how it would be living off the land? Plenty of water, vegetation, and presumably, wildlife.
The top third might as well be on the moon, 600+ miles of complete wasteland. Now I get why they practice Mars missions in the Atacama desert, driest place on Earth. Some spots have never received rainfall in recorded history. You could straight up perform heart surgery in the open with zero fear of microbes or fungi.
The middle chunk, from about Santiago down, looks fairly normal. Plenty of cities and roads and fields, land isn't too cracked up, seems flat enough, especially compared to the rest of the geography.
EDIT: Did some more looking. The south looks like an ambitious D&D map. No need to look further, it's all like that.
LOL, found a golf club smack in the desert. (-21.90611744187072, -70.17456583673224) Found a food truck in the desert with nothing else nearby. Lost that one, can't find it again.
Wow, you're right. There really is just nothing in the south. Argentina has all usable land and Chili really did just claim the rest of it.
Some of it would be absolutely amazing to visit, but impossible to get to (For the better to be honest, let's have some untouched places in the world)
The desert side is also quite empty, but nowhere near as much as the south
That golf course is pretty interesting, although 20km away from the nearest town is not so bad
California is only 800 miles long. The contiguous US at its longest from North to South is only 1,650. Chile is hung like a horse.
It looks like such a huge score for them, because coastline is generally more valuable than inland. I don't know if that's the case here though
The cold Humboldt Current runs along pretty much all of Chile. It contributes to a productive fishery, but is also why a lot of the land is desert. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
Yeah, coast is nice but I wonder if it's nice if you only got coast.
It must make it pretty hard to design transport infrastructure for example. But I guess the country is still fairly wide so maybe it doesn't matter much.
For comparison, California is around 800 miles long. Chile be hogging that beach front property.
Eh. They could have used a different projection. It's kinda silly to grab, say, Algeria, move it around, and see it grow and shrink.
that's literally the point of the website, to show how countries change as you move them about the mercator projection (which is the standard projection we interact with)
What's even more interesting is that Chile is a long ass island in Europe. TIL, definitely.
E: The more I look at the "map" the more interesting it gets...
Look at em. Just hogging the whole southwest coast of South America, like they were a resort developer.
