| @btroup1: AFAIK, the extent of territorial waters (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters) is a bit of a sticky matter. If include the territorial waters of island nations in the latitude spans, then to be consistent I'd have to include the waters of all other nations in their spans as well. So if I do this, whether or not I use the 12-mile, 24-mile, or 200-mile range, it's going to be messy, especially where nations have less than that amount of water between them. Now, if I don't include the territorial waters and just go by land, I'd be measuring the latitude spans of every individual island or land mass belonging to each nation. This is particularly impractical for cases such as Kiribati. So I went with (what I thought) was the simplest method, attributing all lands north of 60 degrees S to the 192 UN member states and then measuring the latitude difference between the northernmost to southernmost point of each nation (including dependencies). The inclusion of dependencies is of course a contested matter here, but if, for instance, I exclude Bouvet Island from Norway, wouldn't I also have to exclude Greenland from Denmark? Greenland makes the list on its own, but is not a fully sovereign state. It would be inconsistent of me to including Greenland with sovereign, UN member states, but it still exists; it's still a big land mass with a wide latitude span. So I grouped it with Denmark, just as I grouped Bouvet with Norway. That's basically the reasoning behind how I approached this quiz. |
Longest Coastlines 
World's Longest Borders 
Longest Total Land Borders
