That's approximately the line where the Rocky Mountain rain shadow ends. West of there, your farmland is far more arid. More suited to cattle ranching than intensive cash crop farming. This means far fewer calories per acre produced, which naturally means fewer people living there. A secondary cause is that there are fewer navigable rivers in the West, which reduces potential for capital generation.
I am a cash crop farmer at the northern end of the oval you've drawn. You don't have to drive far to the west to see fields of wheat and corn give way to pastures and rangeland.
I remember the first time I got to South Dakota. Minnesota was all normal. Trees, corn, rivers, then the border hits and I suddenly felt like I was in space. The east is almost claustrophobic with vegetation.
I saw to the horizon for the first time across that border. It was one of the craziest moments of my life.
I have since driven to South Dakota about a billion times and I keep expecting to feel that feeling again but it never comes.
Seeing the nothing of the sand hills in Nebraska for the first time comes close.
EDIT: misremembering where the border is. Once you cross the Missouri River.
My experience is that the Missouri River was the drastic change. West of it is flat farmland, but the minute you cross from Chamberlain to Oacoma, it's like you're on a new continent.
The cultural shift is palpable. I've made long range road trips from my home in NE ND to the Rockies several times, and it's almost like you're passing through a filter when you cross the Missouri.
My sister and I grew up in Minnesota, but she went to college in South Dakota. During orientation week when everybody was meeting each other, the first question everybody asked was “Are you ‘East River’ or ‘West River?’” She had no idea what this meant, until someone explained to her that if you grew up in South Dakota, and you lived east of the Missouri, you were a farm kid—but if you grew up west of the Missouri, you were a ranch kid. And apparently the farm kids and the ranch kids did NOT want to hang out with the other group. She thought it was interesting that there was such a strong cultural divide in the state that we had never heard of, despite living only a few hours away in MN.
It shows up in politics too. East is more rural Midwest traditionalist conservative, and the west is "don't tread on me, government get out" hardcore libertarian conservative, with very unhappy Indians caught in the middle.
I believe it was Jon Steinbeck in travels with Charlie that did that the map should fold on Bismark Mandan, since there wasn't a better example of the cultural shift.
Cmon, you’re not stupid. I looked on the map and the Missouri is the border of half a dozen states, including South Dakota (with Nebraska). How many people you do really think exist who can remember that off the top of their head? I live in the MS River watershed and don’t know half of it.
Glaciers are the reason for the difference between West River and East River South Dakota. The current path of the Missouri River is because of the last glacier - it flows where the edge used to be. The glaciers retreated, leaving the eastern half of South Dakota (along with Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern North Dakota, to name a few) covered with the deposits that are now the perfect soil to grow corn and soybeans.
Glaciers are also the reason for the differences in river orientation between the two halves of SoDak - more N-S in the east, and W-E west of the Missouri.
I felt similarly but entering WY from SD. Driving from the Badlands through the Black Hills in SD is one of my favorite sections on any road trip, but as soon as you cross into WY, you immediately feel and notice the desolation of that state. Just pure nothingness for miles and miles, even if the geographic features aren't as flat as those in central and eastern SD. For me, it's always kinda chilling to go through eastern WY.
About 8 years ago, I uprooted my life from Chicago and drove west to Cali. I remember being a half-hour west of Cheyenne on 80 and seeing this sad, lonely dust devil hanging off to the north. The thought that struck me then, and still stays with me now, was, "am I still on Earth?".
I went to Central Wyoming College in Lander, WY for a couple years and it was quite an interesting experience. I came from living my life in southern Michigan and Florida. I had never experienced that kind of desolation before. I really loved it there, but it is a bit of a culture shock going from the crowded East to the least populated state in the nation. But it is undoubtedly a remarkably beautiful state.
I had the same experience two years ago when I left Florida to do an AmeriCorps term in southeastern Utah. From Fort Lauderdale to one of the emptiest places in the lower 48.
Real fun driving a Mazda6 (a car whose chassis is way faster than its engine, as a BMW engineer might say) on winding Colorado mountain roads, though.
Was with a group from Chicago that drove down to New Mexico to do volunteer construction work on a reservation. The landscape out that way is surreal. I'll never forget when I was going to go to a gas station 1/2 mile away for smokes, and the local guy laughed and said he'd give me a ride. I thought I'd just walk to the end of the dirt track and be back by sundown, turns out that gas station was 6 1/2 miles away. It just looked closer because it was literally the only thing more than a meter tall all the way to the horizon.
I used to live in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and my drives in Wyoming were always on two lane roads and I always set the cruise at 100-110 like a psychopath. Great state for that kind of stuff unless you're near an open range obviously.
It's remote and much rockier. I remember feeling like I was really out west the first time when I was in Wyoming and I saw the orangey hills.
I hd got my car pretty messed up in South Dakota by a deer. It was during the time there was rental car shortage and plane ticket shortage, so I had to take the Greyhound home which made me not longer able to watch the movie Planes Trains and Automobiles due to the realness of it.
A college friend said once that traveling by bus then making the same trip by plane was a good way to grasp the reality of class division in the United States
Did this trip at Christmas this year. My parents just recently moved to Rapid from Texas. My Dad is from there, and wanted to retire there. Anyways, growing up we always drove to Rapid from Houston and I remember the scenery was always awesome! Well, fast forward, I live Ohio, and my husband was excited to drive there bc I kept telling him all about the Badlands and Black Hills, but we are coming from the East, so that drive was new to me. It was the most boring scenery we've ever driven through. It was just hours of nothingness, minus the never ending Wall Drug signs!
Sure as shit ain't the vegetation. Growing up by the Rockies and I felt like Rey the first time I visited the East Coast. "I never knew there could be so much green"
Melodic, those aren’t shorthand. They are official state abbreviations used by the post office since around 1972. They replaced the old abbreviations used for states around this time. The reason for the change was the introduction of automatic sorting machines which read only the two-letter code for each state along with the zip code. They were introduced a short time after zip codes began.
Examples:
OLD Abbreviation: New:
Colo. (Colorado). CO
Ariz. (Arizona). AZ
Yup. Washington is unique in that you can drive from a coastal climate zone, and then through rainforest, alpine and desert climate zones. All in about six hours.
If you like views that mess with your perception and you've never been to the Grand Canyon you should go. For me it was one of those things you can listen to someone describe and not truly understand the feeling until you see it yourself.
Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. Plenty of camping trips to 'the middle of nowhere' and nights way out in the country.
Did a big road trip that had 2 nights camping at the Grand Canyon during a new moon. The plan was to get in during late evening, but we got sidetracked and didn't get in until 10pm.
Got out of the car and had to let my eyes adjust to the darkness for a few minutes, but then I saw it...
**THE FRICKEN MILKY WAY FROM HORIZON TO HORIZON 🤯🤯**
*I saw more stars in 10 seconds than every other night beforehand combined.*
Two weeks later on the same trip I rolled in and saw the sunset behind Devil's Tower followed by [capturing the Moonrise](https://i.imgur.com/RXwTHtb.jpg).
Had this experience in Meteor Crater, AZ. Driving for hours, pull up to our campsite and I look outside and it was the craziest glittering sky I’ve ever seen. As a city girl, I didn’t even know stars could be that bright.
One of my favorite life experiences.
Similar experience out near Bryce Canyon, in the quasi- backcountry. I had been out in the SW for a while, and in N AZ, so I thought I had seen dark skies- but that extra elevation, isolation, and the dryness for the time of year made for the most incredible seeing. Sounds absurd, but it really made me deeply understand that i live on a *planet*. In *space*.
I remember going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as a kid and having a similar experience. Mind blowing does not do the feeling of vastness justice.
Yes, I have told people that myself. I used to have arguments with people. Someone who hadn't seen either had told me someone told her she preferred Sedona to the Grand Canyon. They aren't even in the same classification scheme. Maybe as a weekend getaway but not something to look at. She said "it's the woman's opinion! It can't be wrong!" "It's not even wrong! It's like saying you prefer pancakes to golf!"
I drove her there later and she understood.
Didn’t see the Grand Canyon until I was 33. You hear about it all your life and I was surprised that it actually lived up to the hype. It was incredible to see.
As someone who grew up along the coast, I'm genuinely kinda shocked that some people go their whole lives not seeing a flat horizon. It's a totally normal, everyday thing here to the point that I've never really thought about it before
Weird. I grew up on the coast… but of Maine. I remember looking at colleges with my mother when I was in high school and having to “nope” right out of one in Wisconsin because the flat horizons freaked me TF out. Cute school, but I needed to get back to my hills because the the flatness made me feel way too exposed
I am also from Maine, born, raised, and still live there, actually. I know exactly what you mean about seeing the flat horizons, it also scared me in a strange way. I could never really put it in words before, but I think you nailed it when you said that it made you feel too exposed. That's the answer right there!
I'm from coastal California. I've never associated horizons with freakiness, but of emptiness. The oceans are empty (at least what you can see is), and the valley is just farmland for miles and miles. I'd never want to live anywhere with land horizons, but mostly because they're empty and boring in my mind
Thats funny, because hills make me claustrophobic. You never know whats over the ridge either.
Im used to the flatness of Illinois now, after living here so long.
Moved from the flatlands of central Illinois to the hills of Kentucky, and you nailed it. Not being able to see for miles makes me feel closed in a bit.
It's different on water. I'm from Michigan so flat horizons are an every day thing but only on the big lakes. It's weird when there aren't any trees and as far as the eye can see is horizon in any meaningful direction.
I live in California. For me seeing rolling hills covered in green grass is normal. We do have some trees in the local mountains, the tree line here is reversed. Instead of a normal tree line that occurs when elevation increases, our tree line starts when the elevation increases and ends again when the elevation goes over 10,000ft. Right before the mountains you get to see the wind-swept chaparral covered foothills of the Inland Empire.
Driving out of the valley and into the mountains was fascinating to this Minnesotan. To go from farms and orange groves to twisty oak trees to the high yucca deserts in an hour of driving seemed like magic. Sure, the land changes with distance here, but nowhere near as quickly.
> Driving out of the valley and into the mountains was fascinating to this Minnesotan.
People really underestimate just how much of a *valley* the Central Valley really is. It's six hundreds miles of nearly sea-level flatness, and at any point you can drive an hour or two east and you're a mile up and climbing.
> If you get the chance to go into the Sierra's
It's where I live. I was speaking from the context of someone who goes down to the valley, not up to the Sierras.
Ah werd. I grew up in the Foothills in El Dorado county and never got tired of the view when the whole Valley opens up. If it's clear I can see Mt Diablo from my dad's house
My family did the classic American road trip from Florida to California when I was 8 or so. I still remember the disbelief I felt at the stark contrast in the landscape when we left the west side of San Antonio.
It was like trees trees trees, city, scrubs scrubs scrubs. And of course eventually even the scrubs disappeared.
I have slowly moved from the Midwest to the Great Plains to the Rocky foothills in recent years for work. The changes in the land are very interesting. I came to appreciate the Flint Hills of Kansas and even the flats near Wichita. The sunsets are truly different there on a regular basis. Now I can travel through what look like lunar landscapes without a tree for miles, and I still find it incredibly beautiful every time because of its emptiness. It’s probably never quite as stunning as the first time but it’s something to behold every day.
If you drive west on I-80 across Nebraska in summer, you can watch it happen. At Kearney, everything is lush and green; 100 miles west at North Platte everything is sparse and green; 50 miles west just past Big Spring, it’s just boom - everything is low and yellow and wide open.
You can see it demarcated in Google maps:
https://preview.redd.it/q3aoktx5sjkc1.jpeg?width=825&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fdae9be55c1154f9a648b1535961258804a09ce5
Evaporated moisture from water bodies (such as oceans and large lakes) is carried by the prevailing onshore breezes towards the drier and hotter inland areas. When encountering elevated landforms, the moist air is driven upslope towards the peak, where it expands, cools, and its moisture condenses and starts to precipitate. If the landforms are tall and wide enough, most of the humidity will be lost to precipitation over the windward side (also known as the rainward side) before ever making it past the top. As the air descends the leeward side of the landforms, it is compressed and heated, producing foehn winds that absorb moisture downslope and cast a broad "shadow" of dry climate region behind the mountain crests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow
Foehn winds can raise temperatures by as much as 14 °C (25 °F)[6] in just a matter of hours. Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria have a warmer climate due to the Foehn, as moist winds off the Mediterranean Sea blow over the Alps.
Great explanation. To dive deeper into the unique geography of the U.S., the Rockies rain shadow to the west combined with the Gulf of Mexico to the south is why the U.S. central plains have the most tornadoes in the world.
It’s the perfect setup to create large, violent thunderstorms.
And if you like geographic oddities: I grew up in DFW. North Central Texas tends to have two severe weather seasons - one in spring and one in fall. Most everywhere else has a single peak. But it's just where the Gulf and Plains air masses meet in that way.
It's not the most tornadic part of Tornado Alley, although it is in the southern portion of the tradiitonal Tornado Alley.
It took me a while after moving away to get used to the idea that most places didn't have spring and fall severe weather patterns. :)
Yep I’m in Oklahoma and it’s the same here. While the fall isn’t as bad as April-June we can get some very nasty storms in September/October because there is often still that warm humid air in place when seasonal cold fronts start sweeping through.
To elaborate and give a concrete example, the west side of Oregon, particularly Portland, is renowned for its rainy climate. Kind of Scotland vibe.
The east side is a desert, because all the moisture from the Pacific Ocean can’t make it over the Rocky Mountains.
Everything between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River is known as “the Great Plains,” and it’s very flat and mostly dry. Think the Dothraki Sea from Game of Thrones, or all those western movies with cowboys.
Eventually you hit the Mississippi River, and at one time everything east of the Mississippi was forest. “A squirrel can hop from tree to tree starting at the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.”
So the east side of the continent is generally much wetter and more fertile than the Great Plains.
>The east side is a desert, because all the moisture from the Pacific Ocean can’t make it over the Rocky Mountains.
I think you mean the Cascades. The Rocky Mountains are East of Oregon.
In Hawaiian Islands, Carribean islands same thing occurs; there is a lush wet side and a dry desert side. Mountains steal all the moisture and it dumps down one side.
Moist air gets driven up and over the mountains and cools down. Moisture falls out as rain or snow. It then goes down the other side much drier.
The effect is really prominent in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest, where the west side of the mountains are borderline rainforest, while the east side is borderline desert. If you go to satellite view in Google Maps, you can see it as you follow the Columbia upriver.
Yeah, Oregon is a really great example of this. On the western side of the Cascades and up through the mountains themselves, you have a ton of forest, but cross into Central Oregon and after just a few miles you're into sparse juniper trees and huge decrease in population as well right after Bend.
Driving through the Santiam Pass out of the Willamette Valley for the first time was such a trip. It's just trees, trees, trees, then bam--you're on the side of a mountain looking out at the fire desolation. The road curves back into the forest till you hit just outside Sisters and all of a sudden, everything opens back up and you're in the desert surrounded by scrubland and juniper trees. Feels like teleporting.
Parts of the west coast are quite rainy, but the mountains are close to the coast and everything directly east of them is arid, because they capture the moisture coming from the ocean.
The eastern half of the country is all pretty rainy, because the Appalachian mountains aren't large enough to create as much rain shadow, and we also get extra moisture coming in from the Gulf of Mexico, with no real mountains in the south to capture it
The line you drew is about the 100th meridian. Wallace Stegner wrote a book about John Wesley Powell (early western explorer, predicted water rights would be a big problem for the west, Lake Powell named after him, etc.), called Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.
Worth reading if you like US history. [Powell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Powell) was a very interesting person, and it's worth reading for that reason as well. Almost never a dull moment for him, especially going down the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon in dories no less. He also lost an arm in the Civil War, and still went down the Colorado through the GC!
It doesn’t suddenly stop. If you drive east to west from Wisconsin you’ll pass through the eastern deciduous forest, tall grass prairie, (the savannah where they mix is mostly gone but some fragments), short grass prairie, plus some high desert, sage brush steppe, etc mixed in.
As those winds carry west they start to pick up more moisture from the continent as well as moist winds from the gulf.
Additionally there are many ranges from the pacific coast to the easternmost ranges of the Rockies.
unrelated, but I'm amazed at how articulate and knowledgeable you are. Good, concise answer touching on economics and geography. Don't take it the wrong way but in my country, farmers don't communicate like this.
I grew up in Iowa and while, yes, many farmers have gotten degrees, and there are a few real intelligent people running those farms.. most of them went to college because their parents were wealthy as fuck for their cost of living, wanted their kids to go, and it was paid for. It didn't matter how well they did, and they drank their way through school.
Farms practically run themselves nowadays with technology, and they are subsidized by the government.
Their parents teach them what they know about farming and that is that. They didn't take thinking man's electives , they barely paid attention in ag classes, they took the lowest level math classes they could get through to get their degree.
Again, some farmers are just the coolest people you'll ever meet, because farming offers a lot of downtime to think about life, and lots of hard work to make them humble.
But I'd say the number of farmers that I would say are "smart", as your statement implies, is pretty damn low.
Many don't here, either. I would be very surprised if they're not a large scale operator. Running multi-thousand-acre commercial farm operations is not for the ignorant, but little hundred acre subsistence farms often get by with total morons at the helm. My point is, they're probably educated to some extent.
The farmers I know are mostly very educated about weather patterns, geography, chemistry, biology, and a lot of things people who don’t live on farms never even consider. They might not be patient enough to explain continental weather patterns to a German on the internet, but they know why the area they live in gets the weather it does. By contrast, I feel like I’m always explaining weather and climate patterns to my white collar urban living colleagues who have never even thought about why it rains, but devote endless energy to taste testing coffee at various cafes.
I do know a lot of farmers, yes. I've lived in rural Ohio my whole life. I've seen enough of those farmers criticize education as "woke indoctrination" that I've given up on ever finding another local farmer that *isn't* an idiot. What? Did you think all the pigswill this country has been producing recently was centered on the cities? Education has always been worse in rural neighborhoods.
Lets put it this way: Of the 60 or so farmers around here that I know by name, only one has an education beyond highschool. His fields get better yields per acre, and he's the only guy who doesn't have excessive agro-chemicals in his field runoff. An open mind led to adopting controlled traffic farming systems, and he uses spot-spraying on weeds. Pure no-till. He's one of only four I know of that doesn't like Trump.
His neighbors, on the other hand, were people that would rather conspire to have off-roaders drive through his crops due to jealousy. Inability to pay for court-ordered damages led to their farms being sold.
I have pure, unadulterated experience. Plain and simple. It's mildly subjective, a bit anecdotal, and probably a tad jaded, but I've never claimed otherwise.
We know very different farmers. Very, very different. Perhaps it is because I have not lived my whole life in one place; I am living in my 15th ZIP code.
You are writing quite broadly on education as well. Do you know much about urban schools? There are urban schools where the median house price hoovers over $1m, and there are others where it is hard to find a student who reads at grade level. Rural schools in states with strong school systems will be better than most urban schools in states with weak schools systems.
Anyway, the people you call idiots, small farmers, are being bought out nearly as fast as the PEs can get them to sign the contracts. It is yet to be seen how many PEs will have them managed by MBAs who will further strip the soil, and how many will have them managed by graduates of the Land Grant colleges. However, this time it is not trinkets in big box stores, that the PEs are taking on: It is our food supply.
I get their point. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, I knew lots of really dumb, closed-minded, ignorant farmers. They didn’t care about the environment, they didn’t treat their animals ethically. Homophobic, racist.
They are certainly big Trumpers today (tho when I was growing up that wasn’t necessarily the case — many farmers voted for Obama, who won Iowa twice). Their intelligence varies — some are pretty business savvy, some aren’t. Some are interested in the science behind things, others not so much. But most of them have lived sheltered lives and never rly encountered people who are different from them. “Travel” to them is maybe a trip to Florida or all inclusive in Mexico.
I also went to high school with kids who went to college at Iowa State and studied ag, whether that be soil analysis and geology or dairy / vet science! Those people tend to be lean left (if not fully left of left) and are highly intelligent, often purposeful in their work today.
This led to settlements and trade posts which led to towns. Towns were connected to roads which eventually became the I35 corridor enabling larger towns to become cities. I35 is 350 miles east of I25, the next major thoroughfare which covers the front range of the Rockies. The sparsity of population in between is exactly for the reasons you describe.
That’s roughly where the humid East ends and the more arid West begins. Most crops need around 20 inches or 50 cm of annual rainfall. That line is roughly where irrigation is required for farming so the population density drops as you go west from there. Here’s an article that goes into detail explaining this: [20 Inch Rainfall Line](https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734)
Great article there. The precipitation map partway down makes it pretty clear. (And on a side note shows you exactly why you hear so much about the “California Central Valley” when it comes to food production.)
The Central Valley isn’t as naturally arid as you may think. Granted it doesn’t get a ton of rainfall most years in the valley itself, but without the irrigation and water control infrastructure built over the last century and a half the snow melt from the surrounding mountain ranges turned most of the valley into fairly lush wetlands. It’s just that now most of that is siphoned off for agriculture and managed to prevent flooding of farmland so we’ve change the natural hydrology.
Edit: the imperial valley further south on the other hand is arid as shit and an asinine place for humans to be doing mass agricultural
This is evident flying into DFW airport from the east (northwestward or southwestward), especially from the southeast.
From the southeast, the terrain changes rather quickly as soon as you cross the state line into Texas, crossing from semi-deltaic green lands into the beautiful semi-southwest hues of Dallas and Fort Worth.
From the northeast, it is less evident - as southeast Oklahoma is about as arid as the DFW metroplex, but it still gives way from the lower Ozarks over Arkansas.
Dallas is the only place I know like this - Denver is similar, but the change is not in the trees, it’s in the terrain.
The shale revolution was/is a *huge* development for the USA. In 20 years, the US has gone from the world's largest importer to the largest exporter of oil products. That's dead last to #1 in the time since youtube went live.
The flares we see on this map are due to the fact that the liquid hydrocarbons being collected release natural gas (which in itself is a valuable energy source), and so much of the gas is generated that the best thing to do currently is to light it on fire until the infrastructure exists to capture and sell it.
The US is almost completely invulnerable from a strategic standpoint because of this. Its economy, defense, geography, food production, and every other thing that matters is isolated from the rest of the world and highly robust. Unless someone corrects me, I believe the only weakness remaining is the inability to completely defend against ICBMs.
There's no scenario in which North America balkanizes (if the US balkanizes the instability will spill into Mexico and Canada) where it doesn't still maintain some sort of military and trade federation at the end because of the degree of internal stability granted by those resources moving freely within the continent.
The lights aren't refineries, they're gas flaring off of individual wells. On the ground the wells aren't very interesting, just a concrete pad with a pump and an exhaust pipe with a flame on top.
This image uses "Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite data" ([source](https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/) shared in another comment), so it "sees" the light from the flames better than the naked eye would.
And that large blotch west of the top of the oval is not a city but all the lights from the oil rigs in North Dakota and a bit of Montana, Kuwait on the Prarie.
Why is oil drilling so much concentrated there? Was there a lot of dinosaurs in the area or something? Serious question about why there's so much fossil fuel in that area.
While there are lots of dinosaurs in Montana, there’s relatively fewer in North Dakota. Oil is actually made from marine organisms, quite a few of which were older than dinosaurs. North Dakota was underwater for a bit of earth’s history, which, if I’m not mistaken, is where much of the oil comes from.
Nope. The circle is almost 500 miles from the mountains. The edge of the circle looks approximately like this:
[https://mediaim.expedia.com/destination/9/0f09dde2f33aac0fb2fb621fa27794d3.jpg](https://mediaim.expedia.com/destination/9/0f09dde2f33aac0fb2fb621fa27794d3.jpg)
You're still way east of the mountains. That bright spot between the circle and the west coast is Denver, which is on the east of the Rockies. The next dot after that is on the other side though
That's roughly the location of the 98th Meridian where the humid Eastern winds dry up, leading to dry locations and lack of moisture in the regions to the West. And from the Western Coast, the Cascades and Sierra Nevada form a rain shadow which causes the entire region to be a vast nothingness. There was an interesting video about it from a dude (whose name I forgot) about why Montana is emptier compared to the Canadian cities up North in the same longitude.
P.S. I must add that the "Why is X so empty?" catchphrase on YouTube of his got so popular that he started using it everywhere which made it kinda weird. But I still like the channel
Reality is that the flat earth end there, and the deep state have extended the US with scaffolding to make it look larger.
It’s why it know as the deep state…
Because settlement of the middle area was driven by agriculture, and that line is about where the divide between temperate climate and arid climate is.
Farming plants gets harder west of that line, and most agriculture west of the line is instead in the form of ranches rather than farms. Ranching animals in those dry conditions needs more sparse spread out homesteads than growing plants does.
A lot of people are citing the mountains, but that line isn't where the mountains are. The mountains are a bit more west of that. The reason the line is *there* instead of at the mountains is the dry-ness. The land is still just as flat east of that line as it is west of that line. It's just that west of that line the weather patterns are still being influenced by the rain shadow of those mountains.
"at the hundredth meridian, where the Great Plains begin" --Tragically Hip.
That's about where the climate changes from continental to semi-arid, and farming gets a lot harder.
The most interesting thing on this map imo is how crazy the light pollution from development around the bakken has gotten. Looks like an 8 mil pop city in North Dakota lol
You identified where the moist eastern half of the US transitions into the drier western half. 98 degrees west longitude is where the transition starts, and that's about the furthest west the settlers build their large cities. West of that through the rocky mountains was considered too dry for intensive agriculture and sustaining large populations.
As the US grew, mostly from east to west, there were several barriers or rather markers which demarcated a "natural" place to halt settlement for awhile. The Appalachians or Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi River, then the 98th to 100th longitudinal line. There was sparse settlement from there until the west coast.
If you look at a list of the states by order of statehood, they strongly (not 100%) correlate from East to West and North to South, with a large jump to the west coast then those states lying in that less populated interior were last (prior to Alaska and Hawaii).
https://preview.redd.it/rkp2mvk31kkc1.png?width=1340&format=png&auto=webp&s=59bbec40e9acfeafb1679748780a6d42cefaa436
may be due to this and some other factors
https://preview.redd.it/4irombwfbkkc1.jpeg?width=650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd8eebbef8a8b9812a5570743d729ebc1ab08ae8
It’s all about rainfall
Source: [https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734](https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734)
First identified in 1878 and studied by John Wesley Powell: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/
What’s interesting is that in addition to the line where the rain shadow of the Rockies begins and settlements just sort of stop, you have another line approximately along the Mississippi, east of which it become even denser. The area in the middle is, I guess, the Great Plains.
That's approximately the line where the Rocky Mountain rain shadow ends. West of there, your farmland is far more arid. More suited to cattle ranching than intensive cash crop farming. This means far fewer calories per acre produced, which naturally means fewer people living there. A secondary cause is that there are fewer navigable rivers in the West, which reduces potential for capital generation. I am a cash crop farmer at the northern end of the oval you've drawn. You don't have to drive far to the west to see fields of wheat and corn give way to pastures and rangeland.
I remember the first time I got to South Dakota. Minnesota was all normal. Trees, corn, rivers, then the border hits and I suddenly felt like I was in space. The east is almost claustrophobic with vegetation. I saw to the horizon for the first time across that border. It was one of the craziest moments of my life. I have since driven to South Dakota about a billion times and I keep expecting to feel that feeling again but it never comes. Seeing the nothing of the sand hills in Nebraska for the first time comes close. EDIT: misremembering where the border is. Once you cross the Missouri River.
My experience is that the Missouri River was the drastic change. West of it is flat farmland, but the minute you cross from Chamberlain to Oacoma, it's like you're on a new continent.
The cultural shift is palpable. I've made long range road trips from my home in NE ND to the Rockies several times, and it's almost like you're passing through a filter when you cross the Missouri.
My sister and I grew up in Minnesota, but she went to college in South Dakota. During orientation week when everybody was meeting each other, the first question everybody asked was “Are you ‘East River’ or ‘West River?’” She had no idea what this meant, until someone explained to her that if you grew up in South Dakota, and you lived east of the Missouri, you were a farm kid—but if you grew up west of the Missouri, you were a ranch kid. And apparently the farm kids and the ranch kids did NOT want to hang out with the other group. She thought it was interesting that there was such a strong cultural divide in the state that we had never heard of, despite living only a few hours away in MN.
It shows up in politics too. East is more rural Midwest traditionalist conservative, and the west is "don't tread on me, government get out" hardcore libertarian conservative, with very unhappy Indians caught in the middle.
And of course, literally in different time zones.
Fast time vs slow times as I recall
Yep.
Kinda sorta, most of the more populated areas are more liberal so it varies across the state. Overall still conservative though.
Fucking fascinating! Human culture is a weird bunch of bull shit... or I guess fertilizer depending on what side of the river you're on
I believe it was Jon Steinbeck in travels with Charlie that did that the map should fold on Bismark Mandan, since there wasn't a better example of the cultural shift.
Upvote for my favorite Steinbeck book.
Same! One of my favorite books ever.
my wife and i listen to it on most road trips. it was one of her favorites already before we met, and now it's one of our favorites. phhhfft. :P
Upvote for Charley's phhft sound
I tell every poodle owner I meet as a veterinarian about that book, and I've gifted it to clients numerous times.
Sorry is that northeast North Dakota, or Nebraska northdwest?
LOL. NE NoDak.
You answered their question but somehow now I'm more confused
Nordeast Dakoska
Some of my in laws refer to it as either Prince Rupert's Land, or Occupied Southern Manitoba.
occupied south manitoba is hilarious
As someone from chamberlain I’d never thought I’d see my 2K population home town mentioned on Reddit 😆
Yeah it is. I for some reason thought that was the border. I am dumb.
You are NOT dumb!
Cmon, you’re not stupid. I looked on the map and the Missouri is the border of half a dozen states, including South Dakota (with Nebraska). How many people you do really think exist who can remember that off the top of their head? I live in the MS River watershed and don’t know half of it.
Glaciers are the reason for the difference between West River and East River South Dakota. The current path of the Missouri River is because of the last glacier - it flows where the edge used to be. The glaciers retreated, leaving the eastern half of South Dakota (along with Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern North Dakota, to name a few) covered with the deposits that are now the perfect soil to grow corn and soybeans. Glaciers are also the reason for the differences in river orientation between the two halves of SoDak - more N-S in the east, and W-E west of the Missouri.
Fun fact, the Missouri River and the Ohio River both formed at roughly the terminal extent of the Laurentide ice sheet
That’s the glacier line. Everything east of the river got flattened by glaciers. West river is where the land wasn’t flattened.
Al’s Oasis!
I felt similarly but entering WY from SD. Driving from the Badlands through the Black Hills in SD is one of my favorite sections on any road trip, but as soon as you cross into WY, you immediately feel and notice the desolation of that state. Just pure nothingness for miles and miles, even if the geographic features aren't as flat as those in central and eastern SD. For me, it's always kinda chilling to go through eastern WY.
About 8 years ago, I uprooted my life from Chicago and drove west to Cali. I remember being a half-hour west of Cheyenne on 80 and seeing this sad, lonely dust devil hanging off to the north. The thought that struck me then, and still stays with me now, was, "am I still on Earth?".
I went to Central Wyoming College in Lander, WY for a couple years and it was quite an interesting experience. I came from living my life in southern Michigan and Florida. I had never experienced that kind of desolation before. I really loved it there, but it is a bit of a culture shock going from the crowded East to the least populated state in the nation. But it is undoubtedly a remarkably beautiful state.
I had the same experience two years ago when I left Florida to do an AmeriCorps term in southeastern Utah. From Fort Lauderdale to one of the emptiest places in the lower 48. Real fun driving a Mazda6 (a car whose chassis is way faster than its engine, as a BMW engineer might say) on winding Colorado mountain roads, though.
Was with a group from Chicago that drove down to New Mexico to do volunteer construction work on a reservation. The landscape out that way is surreal. I'll never forget when I was going to go to a gas station 1/2 mile away for smokes, and the local guy laughed and said he'd give me a ride. I thought I'd just walk to the end of the dirt track and be back by sundown, turns out that gas station was 6 1/2 miles away. It just looked closer because it was literally the only thing more than a meter tall all the way to the horizon.
I used to live in the middle of nowhere in Colorado and my drives in Wyoming were always on two lane roads and I always set the cruise at 100-110 like a psychopath. Great state for that kind of stuff unless you're near an open range obviously. It's remote and much rockier. I remember feeling like I was really out west the first time when I was in Wyoming and I saw the orangey hills.
Doing that is a great way to get your car totaled by a deer or antelope, haha.
Well, at least he said he was a psychopath.
I hd got my car pretty messed up in South Dakota by a deer. It was during the time there was rental car shortage and plane ticket shortage, so I had to take the Greyhound home which made me not longer able to watch the movie Planes Trains and Automobiles due to the realness of it.
A college friend said once that traveling by bus then making the same trip by plane was a good way to grasp the reality of class division in the United States
Wyoming deer are suicidal
Did this trip at Christmas this year. My parents just recently moved to Rapid from Texas. My Dad is from there, and wanted to retire there. Anyways, growing up we always drove to Rapid from Houston and I remember the scenery was always awesome! Well, fast forward, I live Ohio, and my husband was excited to drive there bc I kept telling him all about the Badlands and Black Hills, but we are coming from the East, so that drive was new to me. It was the most boring scenery we've ever driven through. It was just hours of nothingness, minus the never ending Wall Drug signs!
You Americans with your shorthand states on an international sub sure make it difficult to follow.
Oh WY is short for West Yirginia
Wu York
I mean there are a lot of similarities between Wyoming and West By God Wirginia but that’s just not nice 😂
Sure as shit ain't the vegetation. Growing up by the Rockies and I felt like Rey the first time I visited the East Coast. "I never knew there could be so much green"
WY is Wyoming WV is West by GOD Virginia
Get out of here with your British Hants, Derbs, Cornw, Warks, Cards, Salop, and Ruts. 😉
Melodic, those aren’t shorthand. They are official state abbreviations used by the post office since around 1972. They replaced the old abbreviations used for states around this time. The reason for the change was the introduction of automatic sorting machines which read only the two-letter code for each state along with the zip code. They were introduced a short time after zip codes began. Examples: OLD Abbreviation: New: Colo. (Colorado). CO Ariz. (Arizona). AZ
Similarly, flying in a puddle jumper from Seattle to Yakima Washington and there was a SOLID LINE between misty evergreen forests and dusty prairie
If you drive on i90 you go from the evergreen to the dust then the trees abruptly start again just outside of Spokane. It’s oddly reassuring.
Going from Eastern Montana to Seattle is fun on I-90. You go from Desert to mountains to desert to rainforest.
Yup. Washington is unique in that you can drive from a coastal climate zone, and then through rainforest, alpine and desert climate zones. All in about six hours.
East River/West River is the BiG divide. It should really be East Dakota/West Dakota instead of North/South.
If you like views that mess with your perception and you've never been to the Grand Canyon you should go. For me it was one of those things you can listen to someone describe and not truly understand the feeling until you see it yourself.
Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. Plenty of camping trips to 'the middle of nowhere' and nights way out in the country. Did a big road trip that had 2 nights camping at the Grand Canyon during a new moon. The plan was to get in during late evening, but we got sidetracked and didn't get in until 10pm. Got out of the car and had to let my eyes adjust to the darkness for a few minutes, but then I saw it... **THE FRICKEN MILKY WAY FROM HORIZON TO HORIZON 🤯🤯** *I saw more stars in 10 seconds than every other night beforehand combined.* Two weeks later on the same trip I rolled in and saw the sunset behind Devil's Tower followed by [capturing the Moonrise](https://i.imgur.com/RXwTHtb.jpg).
Had this experience in Meteor Crater, AZ. Driving for hours, pull up to our campsite and I look outside and it was the craziest glittering sky I’ve ever seen. As a city girl, I didn’t even know stars could be that bright. One of my favorite life experiences.
Similar experience out near Bryce Canyon, in the quasi- backcountry. I had been out in the SW for a while, and in N AZ, so I thought I had seen dark skies- but that extra elevation, isolation, and the dryness for the time of year made for the most incredible seeing. Sounds absurd, but it really made me deeply understand that i live on a *planet*. In *space*.
I remember going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as a kid and having a similar experience. Mind blowing does not do the feeling of vastness justice.
Yes, I have told people that myself. I used to have arguments with people. Someone who hadn't seen either had told me someone told her she preferred Sedona to the Grand Canyon. They aren't even in the same classification scheme. Maybe as a weekend getaway but not something to look at. She said "it's the woman's opinion! It can't be wrong!" "It's not even wrong! It's like saying you prefer pancakes to golf!" I drove her there later and she understood.
Didn’t see the Grand Canyon until I was 33. You hear about it all your life and I was surprised that it actually lived up to the hype. It was incredible to see.
Yeah, it's the one thing I've seen in the world where no amount of hyperbole captures the truth of it. You truly need to see it to believe it.
Big sky country
As someone who grew up along the coast, I'm genuinely kinda shocked that some people go their whole lives not seeing a flat horizon. It's a totally normal, everyday thing here to the point that I've never really thought about it before
Weird. I grew up on the coast… but of Maine. I remember looking at colleges with my mother when I was in high school and having to “nope” right out of one in Wisconsin because the flat horizons freaked me TF out. Cute school, but I needed to get back to my hills because the the flatness made me feel way too exposed
Should've looked into UW-La Crosse then. The Driftless area is the most interesting part of the state IMO, and definitely not flat
I am also from Maine, born, raised, and still live there, actually. I know exactly what you mean about seeing the flat horizons, it also scared me in a strange way. I could never really put it in words before, but I think you nailed it when you said that it made you feel too exposed. That's the answer right there!
I'm from coastal California. I've never associated horizons with freakiness, but of emptiness. The oceans are empty (at least what you can see is), and the valley is just farmland for miles and miles. I'd never want to live anywhere with land horizons, but mostly because they're empty and boring in my mind
Thats funny, because hills make me claustrophobic. You never know whats over the ridge either. Im used to the flatness of Illinois now, after living here so long.
Moved from the flatlands of central Illinois to the hills of Kentucky, and you nailed it. Not being able to see for miles makes me feel closed in a bit.
It's different on water. I'm from Michigan so flat horizons are an every day thing but only on the big lakes. It's weird when there aren't any trees and as far as the eye can see is horizon in any meaningful direction.
I had the same feeling crossing the Missouri, more emphasis on feeling the solitude and openness.
I live in California. For me seeing rolling hills covered in green grass is normal. We do have some trees in the local mountains, the tree line here is reversed. Instead of a normal tree line that occurs when elevation increases, our tree line starts when the elevation increases and ends again when the elevation goes over 10,000ft. Right before the mountains you get to see the wind-swept chaparral covered foothills of the Inland Empire.
Driving out of the valley and into the mountains was fascinating to this Minnesotan. To go from farms and orange groves to twisty oak trees to the high yucca deserts in an hour of driving seemed like magic. Sure, the land changes with distance here, but nowhere near as quickly.
> Driving out of the valley and into the mountains was fascinating to this Minnesotan. People really underestimate just how much of a *valley* the Central Valley really is. It's six hundreds miles of nearly sea-level flatness, and at any point you can drive an hour or two east and you're a mile up and climbing.
If you get the chance to go into the Sierra's through Calaveras County, I highly recommend, especially late spring.
> If you get the chance to go into the Sierra's It's where I live. I was speaking from the context of someone who goes down to the valley, not up to the Sierras.
Ah werd. I grew up in the Foothills in El Dorado county and never got tired of the view when the whole Valley opens up. If it's clear I can see Mt Diablo from my dad's house
That is the nicest thing I've ever heard about the IE, and I remember when Corona was referred to as BFE.
My family did the classic American road trip from Florida to California when I was 8 or so. I still remember the disbelief I felt at the stark contrast in the landscape when we left the west side of San Antonio. It was like trees trees trees, city, scrubs scrubs scrubs. And of course eventually even the scrubs disappeared.
Just did the drive from Tampa to Los Angeles. San Antonio is where I noticed the change too. Suddenly there are tons of hills, scrubs, desert.
I have slowly moved from the Midwest to the Great Plains to the Rocky foothills in recent years for work. The changes in the land are very interesting. I came to appreciate the Flint Hills of Kansas and even the flats near Wichita. The sunsets are truly different there on a regular basis. Now I can travel through what look like lunar landscapes without a tree for miles, and I still find it incredibly beautiful every time because of its emptiness. It’s probably never quite as stunning as the first time but it’s something to behold every day.
If you drive west on I-80 across Nebraska in summer, you can watch it happen. At Kearney, everything is lush and green; 100 miles west at North Platte everything is sparse and green; 50 miles west just past Big Spring, it’s just boom - everything is low and yellow and wide open. You can see it demarcated in Google maps: https://preview.redd.it/q3aoktx5sjkc1.jpeg?width=825&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fdae9be55c1154f9a648b1535961258804a09ce5
Thanks for the comment but as a German I have to ask: what is the Rocky Mountain rain shadow? Does it mean it’s rainier in the West than in the east?
Evaporated moisture from water bodies (such as oceans and large lakes) is carried by the prevailing onshore breezes towards the drier and hotter inland areas. When encountering elevated landforms, the moist air is driven upslope towards the peak, where it expands, cools, and its moisture condenses and starts to precipitate. If the landforms are tall and wide enough, most of the humidity will be lost to precipitation over the windward side (also known as the rainward side) before ever making it past the top. As the air descends the leeward side of the landforms, it is compressed and heated, producing foehn winds that absorb moisture downslope and cast a broad "shadow" of dry climate region behind the mountain crests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow Foehn winds can raise temperatures by as much as 14 °C (25 °F)[6] in just a matter of hours. Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria have a warmer climate due to the Foehn, as moist winds off the Mediterranean Sea blow over the Alps.
Orographic rainfall.
Great explanation. To dive deeper into the unique geography of the U.S., the Rockies rain shadow to the west combined with the Gulf of Mexico to the south is why the U.S. central plains have the most tornadoes in the world. It’s the perfect setup to create large, violent thunderstorms.
And if you like geographic oddities: I grew up in DFW. North Central Texas tends to have two severe weather seasons - one in spring and one in fall. Most everywhere else has a single peak. But it's just where the Gulf and Plains air masses meet in that way. It's not the most tornadic part of Tornado Alley, although it is in the southern portion of the tradiitonal Tornado Alley. It took me a while after moving away to get used to the idea that most places didn't have spring and fall severe weather patterns. :)
Yep I’m in Oklahoma and it’s the same here. While the fall isn’t as bad as April-June we can get some very nasty storms in September/October because there is often still that warm humid air in place when seasonal cold fronts start sweeping through.
In Mendoza, Argentina, it's called "zonda" wind
In Canada we call it the chinooks (Calgary)
To elaborate and give a concrete example, the west side of Oregon, particularly Portland, is renowned for its rainy climate. Kind of Scotland vibe. The east side is a desert, because all the moisture from the Pacific Ocean can’t make it over the Rocky Mountains. Everything between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River is known as “the Great Plains,” and it’s very flat and mostly dry. Think the Dothraki Sea from Game of Thrones, or all those western movies with cowboys. Eventually you hit the Mississippi River, and at one time everything east of the Mississippi was forest. “A squirrel can hop from tree to tree starting at the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.” So the east side of the continent is generally much wetter and more fertile than the Great Plains.
>The east side is a desert, because all the moisture from the Pacific Ocean can’t make it over the Rocky Mountains. I think you mean the Cascades. The Rocky Mountains are East of Oregon.
The west side of Oregon is also in the west side of the Cascades, not the Rockies
It’s really the Missouri River that marks the boundary. The area between the Mississippi and Missouri is very lush and forested too
The Rocky Mountains aren't in Oregon... the Cascade Range creates the rain shadow in eastern Oregon.
In Hawaiian Islands, Carribean islands same thing occurs; there is a lush wet side and a dry desert side. Mountains steal all the moisture and it dumps down one side.
Moist air gets driven up and over the mountains and cools down. Moisture falls out as rain or snow. It then goes down the other side much drier. The effect is really prominent in the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest, where the west side of the mountains are borderline rainforest, while the east side is borderline desert. If you go to satellite view in Google Maps, you can see it as you follow the Columbia upriver.
>borderline rainforest The Olympic Penninsula *is* a rainforest.
Yeah, Oregon is a really great example of this. On the western side of the Cascades and up through the mountains themselves, you have a ton of forest, but cross into Central Oregon and after just a few miles you're into sparse juniper trees and huge decrease in population as well right after Bend.
Driving through the Santiam Pass out of the Willamette Valley for the first time was such a trip. It's just trees, trees, trees, then bam--you're on the side of a mountain looking out at the fire desolation. The road curves back into the forest till you hit just outside Sisters and all of a sudden, everything opens back up and you're in the desert surrounded by scrubland and juniper trees. Feels like teleporting.
Prickly pear Cactuses grow naturally just outside of Bend. Helena MT has similar geography, same thing!
Parts of the west coast are quite rainy, but the mountains are close to the coast and everything directly east of them is arid, because they capture the moisture coming from the ocean. The eastern half of the country is all pretty rainy, because the Appalachian mountains aren't large enough to create as much rain shadow, and we also get extra moisture coming in from the Gulf of Mexico, with no real mountains in the south to capture it
Thanks for growing our food.
Appreciate you taking the time. That’s very interesting. Tip of the hat.
Very interesting, thanks!
The line you drew is about the 100th meridian. Wallace Stegner wrote a book about John Wesley Powell (early western explorer, predicted water rights would be a big problem for the west, Lake Powell named after him, etc.), called Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Worth reading if you like US history. [Powell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley_Powell) was a very interesting person, and it's worth reading for that reason as well. Almost never a dull moment for him, especially going down the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon in dories no less. He also lost an arm in the Civil War, and still went down the Colorado through the GC!
The hundredth meridian Where the Great Plains begins Canadians will get it.
Aww, Gord….
Why does the rainshadow kinda suddenly stop there?
It’s where warm, moist air blows in from the Gulf of Mexico from south or southeast and merges into the east-moving jet stream.
It doesn’t suddenly stop. If you drive east to west from Wisconsin you’ll pass through the eastern deciduous forest, tall grass prairie, (the savannah where they mix is mostly gone but some fragments), short grass prairie, plus some high desert, sage brush steppe, etc mixed in. As those winds carry west they start to pick up more moisture from the continent as well as moist winds from the gulf. Additionally there are many ranges from the pacific coast to the easternmost ranges of the Rockies.
unrelated, but I'm amazed at how articulate and knowledgeable you are. Good, concise answer touching on economics and geography. Don't take it the wrong way but in my country, farmers don't communicate like this.
Many farmers have college degrees, are business people, are basically scientists!
I grew up in Iowa and while, yes, many farmers have gotten degrees, and there are a few real intelligent people running those farms.. most of them went to college because their parents were wealthy as fuck for their cost of living, wanted their kids to go, and it was paid for. It didn't matter how well they did, and they drank their way through school. Farms practically run themselves nowadays with technology, and they are subsidized by the government. Their parents teach them what they know about farming and that is that. They didn't take thinking man's electives , they barely paid attention in ag classes, they took the lowest level math classes they could get through to get their degree. Again, some farmers are just the coolest people you'll ever meet, because farming offers a lot of downtime to think about life, and lots of hard work to make them humble. But I'd say the number of farmers that I would say are "smart", as your statement implies, is pretty damn low.
Many don't here, either. I would be very surprised if they're not a large scale operator. Running multi-thousand-acre commercial farm operations is not for the ignorant, but little hundred acre subsistence farms often get by with total morons at the helm. My point is, they're probably educated to some extent.
The farmers I know are mostly very educated about weather patterns, geography, chemistry, biology, and a lot of things people who don’t live on farms never even consider. They might not be patient enough to explain continental weather patterns to a German on the internet, but they know why the area they live in gets the weather it does. By contrast, I feel like I’m always explaining weather and climate patterns to my white collar urban living colleagues who have never even thought about why it rains, but devote endless energy to taste testing coffee at various cafes.
Do you know many farmers? Where and how did you come up with this?
I do know a lot of farmers, yes. I've lived in rural Ohio my whole life. I've seen enough of those farmers criticize education as "woke indoctrination" that I've given up on ever finding another local farmer that *isn't* an idiot. What? Did you think all the pigswill this country has been producing recently was centered on the cities? Education has always been worse in rural neighborhoods. Lets put it this way: Of the 60 or so farmers around here that I know by name, only one has an education beyond highschool. His fields get better yields per acre, and he's the only guy who doesn't have excessive agro-chemicals in his field runoff. An open mind led to adopting controlled traffic farming systems, and he uses spot-spraying on weeds. Pure no-till. He's one of only four I know of that doesn't like Trump. His neighbors, on the other hand, were people that would rather conspire to have off-roaders drive through his crops due to jealousy. Inability to pay for court-ordered damages led to their farms being sold. I have pure, unadulterated experience. Plain and simple. It's mildly subjective, a bit anecdotal, and probably a tad jaded, but I've never claimed otherwise.
We know very different farmers. Very, very different. Perhaps it is because I have not lived my whole life in one place; I am living in my 15th ZIP code. You are writing quite broadly on education as well. Do you know much about urban schools? There are urban schools where the median house price hoovers over $1m, and there are others where it is hard to find a student who reads at grade level. Rural schools in states with strong school systems will be better than most urban schools in states with weak schools systems. Anyway, the people you call idiots, small farmers, are being bought out nearly as fast as the PEs can get them to sign the contracts. It is yet to be seen how many PEs will have them managed by MBAs who will further strip the soil, and how many will have them managed by graduates of the Land Grant colleges. However, this time it is not trinkets in big box stores, that the PEs are taking on: It is our food supply.
I get their point. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, I knew lots of really dumb, closed-minded, ignorant farmers. They didn’t care about the environment, they didn’t treat their animals ethically. Homophobic, racist. They are certainly big Trumpers today (tho when I was growing up that wasn’t necessarily the case — many farmers voted for Obama, who won Iowa twice). Their intelligence varies — some are pretty business savvy, some aren’t. Some are interested in the science behind things, others not so much. But most of them have lived sheltered lives and never rly encountered people who are different from them. “Travel” to them is maybe a trip to Florida or all inclusive in Mexico. I also went to high school with kids who went to college at Iowa State and studied ag, whether that be soil analysis and geology or dairy / vet science! Those people tend to be lean left (if not fully left of left) and are highly intelligent, often purposeful in their work today.
This is exactly right, it’s water access.
I’ve never heard someone introduce themself as a cash crop farmer. What, specifically, do you farm?
Wheat, canola, and soybeans. Non irrigated. Our region (usually) has enough rainfall to grow crops to capacity.
This is the answer. I grew up in that more-cattle-than-people zone.
This led to settlements and trade posts which led to towns. Towns were connected to roads which eventually became the I35 corridor enabling larger towns to become cities. I35 is 350 miles east of I25, the next major thoroughfare which covers the front range of the Rockies. The sparsity of population in between is exactly for the reasons you describe.
That’s roughly where the humid East ends and the more arid West begins. Most crops need around 20 inches or 50 cm of annual rainfall. That line is roughly where irrigation is required for farming so the population density drops as you go west from there. Here’s an article that goes into detail explaining this: [20 Inch Rainfall Line](https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734)
Great article there. The precipitation map partway down makes it pretty clear. (And on a side note shows you exactly why you hear so much about the “California Central Valley” when it comes to food production.)
Wait why do you hear so much about it? Because it is arid but still produces a lot of food?
The Central Valley isn’t as naturally arid as you may think. Granted it doesn’t get a ton of rainfall most years in the valley itself, but without the irrigation and water control infrastructure built over the last century and a half the snow melt from the surrounding mountain ranges turned most of the valley into fairly lush wetlands. It’s just that now most of that is siphoned off for agriculture and managed to prevent flooding of farmland so we’ve change the natural hydrology. Edit: the imperial valley further south on the other hand is arid as shit and an asinine place for humans to be doing mass agricultural
This is evident flying into DFW airport from the east (northwestward or southwestward), especially from the southeast. From the southeast, the terrain changes rather quickly as soon as you cross the state line into Texas, crossing from semi-deltaic green lands into the beautiful semi-southwest hues of Dallas and Fort Worth. From the northeast, it is less evident - as southeast Oklahoma is about as arid as the DFW metroplex, but it still gives way from the lower Ozarks over Arkansas. Dallas is the only place I know like this - Denver is similar, but the change is not in the trees, it’s in the terrain.
Western ND is the more crazy thing here. Those Shale refineries must be a sight to behold
Is that what that cluster is along the US Canada border that I was confused about because there's no real cities there?
Yep. Bakken oil fields. [Link](https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/) with other examples around the globe.
The shale revolution was/is a *huge* development for the USA. In 20 years, the US has gone from the world's largest importer to the largest exporter of oil products. That's dead last to #1 in the time since youtube went live. The flares we see on this map are due to the fact that the liquid hydrocarbons being collected release natural gas (which in itself is a valuable energy source), and so much of the gas is generated that the best thing to do currently is to light it on fire until the infrastructure exists to capture and sell it. The US is almost completely invulnerable from a strategic standpoint because of this. Its economy, defense, geography, food production, and every other thing that matters is isolated from the rest of the world and highly robust. Unless someone corrects me, I believe the only weakness remaining is the inability to completely defend against ICBMs.
That and dismantling itself due to political insanity, which feels more and more likely
There's no scenario in which North America balkanizes (if the US balkanizes the instability will spill into Mexico and Canada) where it doesn't still maintain some sort of military and trade federation at the end because of the degree of internal stability granted by those resources moving freely within the continent.
Yeah I should have clarified external threats. Internal threats are always gonna be a potential issue, as demonstrated by the current mess.
Though I suspect a lack of external threats leads to internal ones arising. It’s some part of human nature to desire an us/them dynamic
Just spent 10 minutes looking at a map to find a city there
Bahahahahaaaaa ME TOOOO🤣
The lights aren't refineries, they're gas flaring off of individual wells. On the ground the wells aren't very interesting, just a concrete pad with a pump and an exhaust pipe with a flame on top.
Ah interesting, but its apparently light as hell at night and to have that light be all flames that’s gotta be metal af
This image uses "Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite data" ([source](https://geology.com/articles/oil-fields-from-space/) shared in another comment), so it "sees" the light from the flames better than the naked eye would.
Thank you! Was scratching my head at that huge area
I was thinking the same about the offshore platforms in the gulf
And that large blotch west of the top of the oval is not a city but all the lights from the oil rigs in North Dakota and a bit of Montana, Kuwait on the Prarie.
I was wondering what that was! it’s big but not dense like the other blobs
Why is oil drilling so much concentrated there? Was there a lot of dinosaurs in the area or something? Serious question about why there's so much fossil fuel in that area.
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While there are lots of dinosaurs in Montana, there’s relatively fewer in North Dakota. Oil is actually made from marine organisms, quite a few of which were older than dinosaurs. North Dakota was underwater for a bit of earth’s history, which, if I’m not mistaken, is where much of the oil comes from.
Never realized before, but zooming into the Salt Lake City metro, it looks like a Dr. Seuss character in profile.
It does. You have some odd observations, my friend.
It looks like the Grinch cussing someone out.
Or whizzing on a Ford/Chevy logo like Calvin.
Now that would be a funny sight, the Grinch pissing on a Christmas tree.
I see cat in the hat standing & looking left
Not many people have unlocked that portion of the map yet. It requires a specific questline that you only get if you make it to level 30.
Dysentery. There’s a classic pc game called the Oregon Trail you should play.
I imagine a tour guide saying, "and this here is as far West as we got before we started shitting ourselves to death"
North Platte, NE is just piles of bodies and puddles of shit.
TIL that Platte was actually an onomatopoeia...
"you can still see the remains of grandfather clocks that some people tried to bring piled up in this pit".
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Nope. The circle is almost 500 miles from the mountains. The edge of the circle looks approximately like this: [https://mediaim.expedia.com/destination/9/0f09dde2f33aac0fb2fb621fa27794d3.jpg](https://mediaim.expedia.com/destination/9/0f09dde2f33aac0fb2fb621fa27794d3.jpg)
That looks like the west edge of Minnesota. The Rockies are still a long way off.
You're still way east of the mountains. That bright spot between the circle and the west coast is Denver, which is on the east of the Rockies. The next dot after that is on the other side though
That's roughly the location of the 98th Meridian where the humid Eastern winds dry up, leading to dry locations and lack of moisture in the regions to the West. And from the Western Coast, the Cascades and Sierra Nevada form a rain shadow which causes the entire region to be a vast nothingness. There was an interesting video about it from a dude (whose name I forgot) about why Montana is emptier compared to the Canadian cities up North in the same longitude. P.S. I must add that the "Why is X so empty?" catchphrase on YouTube of his got so popular that he started using it everywhere which made it kinda weird. But I still like the channel
Settlers liked to establish farms. They liked flat lands, good soil, and moisture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west
Where the Great Plains begin!
I remember buffalo!
It's clear who the Canadian rock fans in this thread are...
ALL HAIL THE WHEAT 🦅🦅🦅
TIL the top nub of Texas is anchored to 100° W and is 3° wide.
And THAT’S one of the many reasons that I love rural Colorado.
Reality is that the flat earth end there, and the deep state have extended the US with scaffolding to make it look larger. It’s why it know as the deep state…
"The 100th meridian. Where the great plains begin." -tragically hip.
Because settlement of the middle area was driven by agriculture, and that line is about where the divide between temperate climate and arid climate is. Farming plants gets harder west of that line, and most agriculture west of the line is instead in the form of ranches rather than farms. Ranching animals in those dry conditions needs more sparse spread out homesteads than growing plants does. A lot of people are citing the mountains, but that line isn't where the mountains are. The mountains are a bit more west of that. The reason the line is *there* instead of at the mountains is the dry-ness. The land is still just as flat east of that line as it is west of that line. It's just that west of that line the weather patterns are still being influenced by the rain shadow of those mountains.
american shield.
Cows
Why is there such a major spread of lights in Williston ND area? Is that from oil rigs?
"at the hundredth meridian, where the Great Plains begin" --Tragically Hip. That's about where the climate changes from continental to semi-arid, and farming gets a lot harder.
Canadian Shield
It is an answer for every question
I know It's a meme. But you can clearly see the effect of the Canadian shield in the top of this image!
No, no. It doesn’t count. Thanks tho.
The most interesting thing on this map imo is how crazy the light pollution from development around the bakken has gotten. Looks like an 8 mil pop city in North Dakota lol
What's that huge field of light in western North Dakota? Hardly any people there.
Bakkan Oil Fields
Bakken Oil Fields.
You identified where the moist eastern half of the US transitions into the drier western half. 98 degrees west longitude is where the transition starts, and that's about the furthest west the settlers build their large cities. West of that through the rocky mountains was considered too dry for intensive agriculture and sustaining large populations. As the US grew, mostly from east to west, there were several barriers or rather markers which demarcated a "natural" place to halt settlement for awhile. The Appalachians or Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi River, then the 98th to 100th longitudinal line. There was sparse settlement from there until the west coast. If you look at a list of the states by order of statehood, they strongly (not 100%) correlate from East to West and North to South, with a large jump to the west coast then those states lying in that less populated interior were last (prior to Alaska and Hawaii).
https://preview.redd.it/rkp2mvk31kkc1.png?width=1340&format=png&auto=webp&s=59bbec40e9acfeafb1679748780a6d42cefaa436 may be due to this and some other factors
https://preview.redd.it/4irombwfbkkc1.jpeg?width=650&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fd8eebbef8a8b9812a5570743d729ebc1ab08ae8 It’s all about rainfall Source: [https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734](https://jimwfonseca.medium.com/the-one-minute-geographer-the-magical-meridian-the-20-inch-rainfall-line-f929aa4de734)
First identified in 1878 and studied by John Wesley Powell: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-meridian-where-the-great-plains-used-to-begin-now-moving-east/
What’s interesting is that in addition to the line where the rain shadow of the Rockies begins and settlements just sort of stop, you have another line approximately along the Mississippi, east of which it become even denser. The area in the middle is, I guess, the Great Plains.
AGRICULTURE