November 28 2022, 08:06

I was curious to twist in a comment about the 1/6 part of landmass that the USSR once occupied, but after doing the math, it turns out that the USSR didn’t even come close to occupying a sixth of the landmass.

With an area of 22,400,000 km² and a total land area of 20,272,000 km², the USSR made up 20,272,000/148,939,063 = 13.61% = 1/7.35 part of the landmass. The difference from 1/6 is about 2 million km², which is roughly equivalent to the combined area of Germany, Poland, France, Italy, and Spain.

Were we lied to in school?

What else to do at six in the morning but to explore this question.

The first to calculate the ratio of the Russian Empire’s territory to the total land area of the Earth was a military cartographer, Colonel of the General Staff Ivan Afanasyevich Strelbitsky, in 1874. Using a device new at the time—the planimeter—he measured the area of Russia based on available maps and obtained (quote) “18,946,456.3 square versts, or 21,561,450.6 square kilometers, which make up more than 1/6 part of all the land on the Earth.” He referenced calculations by German scientists made in 1872: the surface covered by land, including internal waters and islands on Earth, amounts to 133,770,000 square kilometers.

Fifteen years later, in 1889, the second edition of Strelbitsky’s work was published, by which time he had become a Major General. Over the years, he writes in the preface, “the possessions of the Russian Empire in Europe and Asia increased by 348,215 sq. versts.” German geographers also refined their data: “The surface occupied by land amounts to 119,537,664.8 sq. versts = 136,038,872 sq. kilometers.” Further: “In total, the territories of the Russian Empire, including mainland, internal waters, and islands amount to 19,709,294.4 sq. versts, or 22,430,004.2 sq. kilometers.” Conclusion: “The possessions of the Russian Empire in their entirety cover about 1/6 part of the land surface.” Indeed, when dividing both square versts and square kilometers, the result is 6.065.

So it’s clear how they arrived at these figures, which for the year 1889, might be excusable.

Interestingly, over 30 years, the Earth’s land area decreased, but “only” by 115,000 square km. In another source, there’s a phrase “1/6 part of the inhabitable land.” This raises an interesting question about what is considered inhabitable. It seems to me that there is no, and never has been, uninhabitable land on Earth. But overall, it would probably be fair to exclude the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon tropical forests, Antarctica. But then, it would also be fair to exclude a significant part of northeastern Siberia from the expression.