Almost Everyone on Earth Lives in the Same Hemisphere - Condé Nast Traveler
▻https://www.cntraveler.com/story/almost-everyone-on-earth-lives-in-the-same-hemisphere
The human population of earth, of course, is not distributed evenly over its surface. The “Valeriepieris Circle” is perhaps the most shocking implication of this fact: more than half the people on earth live within a 2,000-mile radius of the town of Mong Khet in northeast Burma. But there’s another way to visualize the way humanity clusters, and for this one, we have to travel from Burma to Switzerland. Let’s call it the Rankin Hemisphere.
Meet a geographer who wants to halve it all.
Bill Rankin is a historian who teaches in the History of Science program at Yale University, and studies the politics of 20th-century cartography in particular. He’s also an all-purpose map lover whose blog, Radical Cartography, is full of cool maps and visualizations. In 2015, Rankin wondered how to define the hemisphere with the highest population, essentially a larger version of the Valeriepieris circle. In other words, if you were going to slice the earth in two with a giant samurai sword, where would you place the cut if you wanted to put as many people as possible in one half? And how many people would that be?
