Talk:Geography of Alaska

Needs Sections and citations

Someone should spend more time cleaning up this article. I added one citation needed at the end, but it need a lot more that that. Also, please add some sections. It is very annoying to read.98.208.193.96 (talk) 13:04, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

--Sections added. user:Marechal Ney —Preceding undated comment added 05:44, 13 June 2011 (UTC).

Physiogeographic names in Alaska Panhandle — ??

Hi Alaska-type folks. I just made up List of physiogeographic regions of British Columbia, which now that I look at what's yet needed on it will probably be retitled List of physiogeographic regions of the Pacific Northwest so it can include AK, YT, WA etc because as we all know political boundaries don't coincide with natural ones in these parts.....One Canadian source (link following) has some terms for the Alaska side of the border that I haven't seen before; do the terms on this map and listed below match any US sources?

• access to online Physiographic map of the Canadian Cordillera, W.H. Mathews, Geophysical Survey of Canada (Natural Resources Canada), 1986
• Kupreanof Lowland
• Chilkat-Baranof Mountains
• Chatham Trough
• Coastal Foothills
• Prince of Wales Mountains (Alaska)
• etc.

There's some more terms on that map which I cant' recall off the top of my head; see Georgia Depression about the "Coastal Trough" which near as i can tell inclues the islands of the Alexander Archipelago, if not the Chilkat-Baranof and Prince of Wales Mtns, which maybe are part of the Insular Mountains formation that includes the Queen Charlottes and Vancouver Island....I'll see if I can find the sources the source-author used; I'm very conscious of making sure both national nomenclatures and definitions are included in such articles; note also this is not about physiogeologic areas, but landform/physiography areas, i.e. not geological "belts" and terranes....Skookum1 (talk) 17:35, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

On the top left corner of the map it's stated terms on the Alaska side were taken from a USGS report by Wahrhaftig, Professional Paper No. 482, with boundaries adapted to fit criteria used for Canadian areas. What those defintions are maybe is in a paralle paper by Mathews I havent' found yet....note also he shows three volcanoes on southern Revillagigedo Island which I don't think are in the Category:Volcanoes of Alaska yet....Skookum1 (talk) 18:21, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Coastline discrepancy

I am prepared to believe that Alaska'a coastline is more than half the US total. However, Geography of the United States lists coastline at 12,380. This article posted on the gov site, claims that the Alaskan coastline is 33,000 miles long with a possibility of 44,000. This seems a bit high IMO. The count at neap high tide, or whatever, needs to be the same as the geodetic survey. So some sort of resolution is needed. More importantly, the actual figure for the coastline should be mentioned and footnoted here. Thanks. Student7 (talk) 00:11, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

This is essentialy impossible, as the length of the coastline is not a well-defined quantity. Because of he essentially fractal nature of coastlines, if you measure them at a fine scale, you get a dramatically larger answer than you would for measuring the same coastline at a coarser scale. Perhaps surprisingly, the state of the tide actually has very little impact on coastline length. For example, consider a circular island with radius 500 miles at high tide: its coastline is 3,142 miles. Suppose that the tide goes out by one mile around the whole island: now the radius is 501 miles but the coastline only increases to 3,148 miles. Also, although the tide coming in makes the landmass smaller, it can increase parts of the coastline. Imagine a triangular inlet whose mouth is half a mile wide and which is a mile deep and suppose that it's completely flooded at high tide and completely empty at low tide. Therefore, at low tide, it has a coastline of about half a mile (the beach across the opening) but, at high tide, it has a coastline of about two miles (the two long sides of the triangle). Dricherby (talk) 17:08, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Accessibility of Juneau

"Alaska is also the only state whose capital city is accessible only via ship or air. No roads connect Juneau to the rest of the continent." This needs to be clarified. Being ultra-pedantic, it's presumably accessible overland by a sufficiently robust off-road vehicle or on horseback or even on foot but that's not important. However, Honolulu is only accessible by ship or by air and has no road connections to the rest of any continent. Since there are no other cities on Oahu, you can't even say that Juneau is the only state capital not accessible by road from any other city. So, in what sense is Juneau the only state capital accessible only by ship and air and without road connections? Dricherby (talk) 17:25, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Mercator??

The small diagram showing Alaska superimposed on the continental US appears to me to be unrealistic. The main corpus of Alaska is shown wider east/west than it is tall north/south; whereas, having just checked the globe I have at home, it appears to be the opposite. I have to wonder if the Alaska diagram (and the continental US?) were taken from a Mercator projection. May I humbly recommend replacing that diagram such that both Alaska itself, and the continental US, are shown as they would appear from above their geographic centroids.
Just for fun, I decided to check on the claim of distance spanned by Alaska, which the article compares to the distance between San Francisco and Jacksonville. Using www.gpsvisualizer.com/calculators to calculate great circle distances (corrected for the Earth's flattening), and lat/long locations as given by Wikipedia, San Francisco to Jacksonville is given as 3820.742 km, 2374.099 mi. Using the same site for the calculation from the westernmost corner of Attu Island to 55°16'55.0"N 129°58'27.8"W, a point on the US-Canada border in the Portland Canal (inlet) between Stewart and Gingolx, B.C,, one gets 3667.618 km, 2278.952 mi. Using that distance from San Francisco, one gets a circle that goes through Madison, Fla. (east of Tallahassee), Augusta, Ga., Blacksburg, Va., Murrysville, Pa. (east of Pittsburgh), and Dunkirk, N.Y. (between Erie, Pa. and Buffalo, N.Y.). Bejmark (talk) 20:46, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

What about Brooks Range?

Why isn't Brooks Range in the geography article of Alaska?

MagnummSerpentinee (talk) 20:09, 28 January 2024 (UTC)