One of the most paradoxical of all Alaska is the fact that it occupies both the eastern and westernmost parts of the USA. A reality that has to do with its geography, the Earth’s hemispheres and the 180th meridian.
To understand exactly what is going on you need to dust off your knowledge a bit and remember that the basic meridian is the commonly accepted length line defined as zero. It intersects the Earth vertically and starts at the North Pole, passes through the Greenwich Observatory in England and ends at the South Pole. Although its existence is purely abstract, it has a global unifying role in measuring space (maps) and time (clocks) consistently across the globe.
This line, then, on the one hand is the prime meridian and the 180th meridian (180o) on the other. Together, they define the eastern and western hemispheres of the Earth, with the United States falling almost entirely into the western hemisphere. The Alaskan Aleutian Islands, then, reach the edge of the western hemisphere at 180 ° meridian, making Amatignak Island (179th west) in Alaska – part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge – the westernmost point of the USA.
In Alaska, however, there is also the easternmost point of the USA, the uninhabited island of Semisopochnoi, which also belongs to the Aleutian archipelago, which crosses the 180º meridian in the eastern hemisphere. Thus, Alaska, in addition to being the northernmost point of the United States of America, is also the westernmost and easternmost state, at the same time, along the USA, due to the peculiarity of the Aleutian islands that cross the 180th meridian, making them so eastern. as well as the westernmost point of the USA.
In fact, according to what Ken Jennings writes in Conde Nast Traveler, “The Semisopochnoi and the twelve Aleutians Islands located beyond that are so west that they are really east! In total, the distance between the easternmost and westernmost points in the United States is only 115 kilometers.
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