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Why Is Chile So Weirdly Long?

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Added by vindheim
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Chile is about 4,300 km long but only about 180 km wide on average. Drop it onto Europe at true scale and it runs from the top of Norway almost to North Africa. Here's why: the Andes and the Pacific set its width, and a string of 19th-century moves set its length, from a fort on the Strait of Magellan to a British king's border award and a war over fertilizer.

0:00 Twenty times longer than it is wide
0:16 Chile on top of Europe
0:50 The Andes: a wall to the east
1:11 The Pacific: a trench to the west
1:33 Every climate in one country
2:25 Colonial Chile was much smaller
3:20 Independence in 1818
3:36 Growing south: the Strait of Magellan
4:12 The border with Argentina
4:53 The 1902 British award
5:12 The north: a war over nitrate
7:07 Why Bolivia is landlocked
7:26 The end of the nitrate boom
7:50 Living in a very long country
8:14 The southern tip
8:32 So why is Chile so long?

Sources: Wikipedia articles on the Geography of Chile, the Andes, the Atacama Desert, the Captaincy General of Chile, the Occupation of Araucanía, the Boundary Treaty of 1881, the War of the Pacific and the Beagle conflict, and their references; UNESCO World Heritage (Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works); INE Chile census 2017; International Court of Justice (Bolivia v. Chile, 2018); Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Imagery: NASA Earth Observatory (Blue Marble Next Generation).
Map data: Natural Earth (public domain). Narration: AI voice (Kokoro). Music and sound effects: original.

#geography #maps #chile #history #andes
Category
ATLANTIC ROAD
Tags
chile, why is chile so long, chile shape
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