Thread by @tomaspueyo

Chile is so long, it's curved

How long is it?
Why not longer?
Why no other country is as long?
How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?

A thread about Chile and its humongous length
🧵

Chile is as long as the US and Canada combined

Chile is as long as all of Europe!

It can stretch from Norway to Morocco
From London to Baghdad!

You can stack over a dozen European countries in Chile north to south

Of course, that means Chile has every possible climate

And of course, Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America

You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land west of it is Chile

(map from @cstats1)

Of course, the mountains are due to the Nazca and tectonic plate hitting the South American one

Here's a superb image of a Chilean volcano (composite of many)

But why so long?
Why not longer?

You can get a sense of that by looking at a satellite map of this region.
From it, can you guess where Chileans live?

You can see it comparing the satellite map and the map of night lights

Chileans live in the middle of the country, in the northern part of the green stripe

What's happening?
(map from @researchremora )

Winds blow westward closer to the Equator and eastward farther south
The Andes stop all the water from the Atlantic closer to the Equator, and from the Pacific farther south

That's why both Brazil and Chile have rainforests
The Chilean one is a temperate rainforest—like in the Pacific Northwest in North America

So all southern Chile is green, but only the northern half of that is warm enough for comfortable living (and closer to other countries' centers of population). That's where most Chileans live

(maps from @PythonMaps and @researchremora)

What about the northern part then, the desert?

Since that area is so dry, it can't handle a lot of population

(These flowers from the Atacama Desert only bloom every few years, when rainfall is unusually high)

And since it's closer to the center of South America, it has neighbors...

Few locals + lots of neighbors➡️This area was contested for a long time after the Spanish Empire collapsed

This is a map of contested areas in South America, 1879

Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific

Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter
Back then, guano was the main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate)
Saltpeter➡️gunpowder

So why is Chile so long, but not longer?
• Sliver between coast & Andes
• Far south: too cold for another country
• Far north: competing neighbors
• Natural border there: desert. Chile won the war to get the tip

That's also why most Chileans live in the middle of the country: too cold in the south, too hot and dry in the north

You can see that effect in a map of South American roads

Cold, heat, sea and mountains make Chile a country—an extremely isolated one

And that's also the main reason why Chileans are incomprehensible: So isolated from all other Spanish speakers!

Why is there no other country so long?
You need a north-south sandwich between sea and continent, far enough from the equator so as not to be densely populated

That means an oceanic plate subducting under a continental plate, which only happens in the...
"Chilean Empire"

Far from the equator, that just leaves:
• Pacific Northwest➡️Got conquered by the Eastern US before it could develop into a standalone country
• Japan: The mountain chain starts from deep under the sea➡️It's an archipelago rather than a continental sliver

So that's why Chile is the longest country in the world!

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