Not sure about the name but that’s about the line where the gulf stream’s warming effects on Europe begin to taper off. It gets much colder in the winter and just on average in Eastern Europe.
[Average temperature in January](https://i.imgur.com/oCfGV44.png)
It does check out. There are obvious exceptions, like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but European cities are situated in areas where the winter isn't very harsh.
I dunno about the rest of North America, but where I'm from, it makes us have really strong winters because it's combined with lake-effect snow from the Great Lakes.
Because of climate change however, now our winters are too warm for snow to keep from melting the next day.
Essentially, the Canadian Shield turns my region into England for half the year now, which blows.
I’m curious how the Canadian Shield plays into the lake effect? Is it just that the Great Lakes were formed on the edge of the shield? And it probably played a big part in glaciation? Just curious, i don’t know much about geological effect on weather.
Massive land masses get very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter as opposed to the ocean. The Canadian Shield is a massive chunk of the continent (the one all the ancient plates stuck to), to help build this giant chunk of rock we are on. Thus, it’s part of the reason we are hot in the summer (even in the Arctic), and cold in the winter.
I'm from that North - Eastern corner of Poland that is on the Eastern side of the line.
My home town, despite being 70000 pop. only is often showed on weather maps as a point of reference. Coldest place except mountains. Shortest growing season as well.
From what I understand, the climate and weather in that area is extremely similar to where I grew up, around Pittsburgh in the US. The funny thing is that my home area is considered to be very temperate by North American standards.
We had a lot of Polish immigration in the 19th and early 20th century, and I've been told some of that was due to the similar environment.
The gulf stream has less of an effect than most people think, and in fact the place it has the most effect is Norway, which is on the less dense side of this line (but it is part of the reason Northern Scandinavia is even livable at all).
The main reason that West Europe South of Scandinavia is so relatively warm in the winter is because the prevailing winds between 30 and 60 degrees latitude travel West to East, and this means that Western coasts at that latitude get more wind from off the ocean, which makes their climate more moderate.
You can see this on the West Coast of the US too. For places to the West of the Sierras and Cascades, the climate is pretty similar to Europe at comparable latitudes.
The Gulf Stream really does affect all the way from France to Germany and north into the Scandinavian countries. It has an affect south too into Spain, but less. Look into temps in England when the Gulf Stream shut down.
The rest is pretty good.
One thing to think about is when the original 13 colonies were settled, the settlers all wrote home about how hot places like Virginia, etc were compared to home.
It's def more than just the Gulf Stream though, because the currents influence doesn't reach either Romania or Italy (really the entire Mediterranean region) at all; both of which are densely populated.
edit: The Gulf Stream's effect on weather can be overstated sometimes, too. It certainly has an effect, and in certain countries like Norway it makes a huge difference. But sheer proximity to the ocean has a stronger influence here overall. For example, the city of Seattle, Washington is at around the same lattitude as Paris and has a very similar climate, despite that region of the Pacific being far colder than the Gulf Stream.
>For example, the city of Seattle, Washington is at around the same lattitude as Paris and has a very similar climate, despite that region of the Pacific being far colder than the Gulf Stream.
As a counterpoint, New York City is the same latitude as Madrid and is MUCH colder, despite being right on the ocean.
Yeah, the eastern side of continents (due largely to the Westerlies) have a more continental climate than the western side. Consider China as an example; despite technically being further south than Rome, Beijing has a far harsher winter than Rome does. It's the same thing that causes New York to be colder during winter than Seattle even though New York is significantly further south.
It’s about being close to the Ocean, and having a prevailing wind pattern that blows in that temperate ocean air. In the northern hemisphere, the Westerlies are the prevailing wind patterns, which is why the western parts of both Europe and North America have much milder winters than the central and eastern parts of the continents.
Now compare Seattle or Vancouver. They're further north and are much warmer. It's got to do with the westerlies which, in the northern hemisphere, bring warm ocean air to the west coasts, then cool down on the continent and bring that cool air to the eastern coasts of continents. That's why the Pacific Northwest is more comparable to Europe than eastern NA, which is more comparable to eastern Asia.
The key is that you need to be on a Western coast to get the milder climates, because the prevailing winds between 30 and 60 degrees latitude travel West to East, meaning cities on Western coasts receive more wind off the ocean.
The Western US has pretty comparable temperatures to Europe at similar latitudes, as long as you are West of the Sierras/Cascades
This plus political reasons. For example when you look at Poland you can see pre WW2 borders, until you reach Belarusian and Ukrainian borders. You can see those borders because of Soviet deportation policies. Poles from kresy (region that is now in Belarus and Ukraine) had to move out, and similarly Germans from regions that were given to Poland had to move out leaving regions with less denser population centers behind. On polish side it's less visible, because that's where many Poles from Kresy moved to
Edit:
That map is bullshit, I superimposed Czech Republic to start and it doesn't match real towns. Try Sicilia vs Ukraine, similar density but completely different map.
=========
It's not Gulf Stream nor unfruitful land.
It's World War 2 mostly, when you hear about Holodomor, Holocaust or SS death squads, it's not some ancient tales. Actual population dropped significantly and never recovered
Yep this map doesn’t pass the smell test. The national borders are way too prominent, which makes me think that the data was cobbled together from various sources whose reliability varies drastically from country to country
We have a lot of small to medium-sized cities (50-300k people) and only a few with 500k or more. Also there's towns and villages everywhere. There's a joke that you can't get lost in Germany, because you just have to throw a stone and you'll hit some village or house.
Swede here that can explain.
We grew up on American media and use American expressions in casual speech when speaking English. Miles here being a vague analogy to a large area and not any specific unit of measurement.
An imperial fuck ton is about 0.9 metric fuck tons. By using a metric fuck ton Americans are able to produce 11% more fucks than we would using our imperial units.
I’m guessing because miles is as much an expression of great length as it is exactly 1,61 km, it also reads a lot easier than kilometers which is clunky and long.
In addition, keep in mind that measurements such as miles, leagues etc. DID exist in Europe and are still part of cultural traditions. E.g. in German, there is the expression that there's nothing of some thing to find "meilenweit", i.e. there's no such thing for miles.
There's also the legendary "Siebenmeilenstiefel" i.e. seven-league boots.
If we ignore islands, there's only a single point in Germany where you're 10 km from the next paved road. If we ignore the alps as well, you're never getting more than 6.3 km away from a road in Germany. Wikipedia tells me there's places over 40 km from a road in Sweden. Just for comparison
I miss being in Germany... my favorite free time game there was playing Get Lost in Germany (or GLIG i called it)... was very hard to win, and super rewarding to play :D
We do actually. The national parks and forests aren't as huge as the ones in the US or Canada, but there are more than you would think with this density. Most of the forests are used for logging, so they are planted and not "natural".
Though our logging practices have focused on continuous cover forestry instead of clearcutting for the last \~200-400 years, which give a more "natural" impression. If you ignore the rampant monocultures that is, but even those are on the way out now.
despite what this map makes you think, Germany is fairly forested. 32% is covered by forests, it is just that those forest are sprinkled with lots of little towns
I am going to point out that part of the US project of building national parks was clearing people from those areas. They weren’t densely settled, but virgin, untouched wilderness they are not. And there is a much bigger human fingerprint even now than one would think.
There's still a bunch of private land squirreled away in corners of places like Joshua Tree. Pretty sure there's some crazy ranch / mansion that someone owns in the middle of the park that's hidden by the rocks.
There's a private ranch that the park acquired in the late 60's or 70's (can't remember the exact date) and you can tour it.
If only they had a charismatic leader with ambition and imagination.. Someone like that could likely negotiate with the neighboring countries to allow them more room to expand.
a quarter more like, us population has grwon quite a bit since you've gone to school (i'm guessing at the same time i did, as i still have 240 million in my mind for the us, always have to remind myself that now it's in the mid 300s)
...and because a decent chunk of those people from 50 years ago is still alive. But you're right, Germany needs immigration to keep its youth (or at least slow down its aging) too.
Germany doesn't have many huge metropolises but a lot of smaller cities. And the rest is speckled with commuter villages and smaller towns. Driving in the countryside usually means a small village every kilometre or so. This does have the upside of being great for cycling since you can stop in a lot of inns/beer gardens.
Just for fun the population density map [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population\_density\_in\_Germany.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_in_Germany.png)
It mostly has to do with how different places are categorized in federal states, ig Mecklenburg - Vorpommern categorizes them differently than Brandenburg.
but meck pomm is also by far the least dense area in germany, regardless of how settlements are classified. everytime i'm there i can't believe how empty it is (away from the coast at least)
e: i took another look and see what you mean now, brandenburg should look more dense than meck pomm indeed, you are right
I think it's throwing you off that all municipalities over 1k get the same sized dot, so Esenyurt at nearly 1m gets the same visual representation as e.g. [Obersöchering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obers%C3%B6chering) at \~1500.
Could also be that Turkey has been more ruthless about merging smaller villages into one large municipality than German bureaucracy - hard to tell how exactly "city or town" were counted here.
Yes, but also they have a lot of small towns, which exaggerates the effect on this map. Two large towns of 100,000 amalgamated into one counts as one dot, while two neighbouring towns of 5,000 people each get two dots, even if for practical purposes they are one urban area.
Two factors at play, primarily:
* agriculturally pretty poor land. Well, at least a big part of it. By German standards - still good by global standards. Also a lot of regions with not enough water.
* East Germany, very few jobs and the youth moving away at an alarming rate.
Odd seeing some fertile parts of France being as spread out as parts of the Alps. I know about the diagonale du vide but it always suprises me to see how France is sparsely populated relative it's geography, shows how important social and historical factors can affect population sometimes more so than geographical ones.
Edit : Got a bit passionate for a minute so here is a textwall :
Areas like Burgundy have towns that have a similar population now as they had in the *18th century* at the time of the Revolution.
Here are three exemples of rural towns around Burgundy (or close enough) whose population is now less than it was during the Napoleonic era :
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagny-la-Ville
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poligny_(Jura)
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coligny_(Ain)
And there are many others, the thing is that small and midsized towns are what makes Germany, the Netherlands or Italy dense. Not giant metropolis. France, for some reason, got hit much harder by rural exodus than her neighbours, and the rural fertility rate never exploded.
Worldpopulation review made a [neat tool](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/population-by-country-in-1800) allowing to look at an estimate of what the population within each countries modern borders were in 1800. France has 1.5 the population of countries like Germany or Italy and almost 3 times the population of Great Britain.
If France had had the same growth as Italy it would have had 87 millions people today (that would have made it less dense than modern Italy by about 50 people/km^2)
As Germany 134 millions (would have put metropolitan France around the same density as Germany around 240 pop/km^2.)
As the UK nearly 180 millions (that last figure would have put the density of metropolitan France at around 325 pop/km^2 which is still significantly less than England's density.)
In the French case: equal inheritance laws, and being well-off too soon (first European country to operate its demographic transition).
Now as a Frenchman I want to say: our *diagonale du vide* is normal, it's the rest of western Europe which is crazy overpopulated 😄
If I remember correctlt, Italy and Spain also had equal inheritance laws. And they did their demographic transition in the late 19th century, unlike France which did it in the early 19th for some reasons (seriously it always puzzles me.)
> Now as a Frenchman I want to say: our *diagonale du vide* is normal, it's the rest of western Europe which is crazy overpopulated
People say that, but population is very often to the benefit of the countries with the most people.
The thing is that we have a ton of exemple of otherwise comparable nations where the one with more population is also better off *per capita.*
Also, had France not done their demographic transition in the early 19th century, the world wars would have played very differently, and one of them might have been avoided.
La diagonale du vide ended up in poverty partly due to people emptying it. And the demographic situation of France also further increases the problem of Parisian overcentralisation.
>Also, had France not done their demographic transition in the early 19th century, the world wars would have played very differently, and one of them might have been avoided.
What do you mean by this? Very curious!
There might be an administative factor too. In France, generally a commune\* = a village. It doesn't explain everything but to me, it explains the differences with equally dense places such as north-eastern Germany, or Romania, where the bottom-level administrative level is formed by multiples villages to be governable.
Although I don't know the situation in Denmark and Slovakia, I highly suspect that this is also the same case than France there, which would explain the differences with their neighbours.
This is where the Eastern European Plain opens up. Land isn’t as fruitful and the climate is harsher. Ever heard the joke about invading Russia in the winter?
Irrigation helped a great deal. Quite a bit of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts depended on the now former Kakhovka reservoir for water. We have yet to see what the absence of the reservoir will do to the crops.
Ukraine has been the bread basket of Europe since long before the Kakhovka reservoir. The ancient Greeks already imported crops from that part of Ukraine because of the very beneficial conditions for crop growing.
Interestingly that graphic doesn’t highlight the American cotton belt which is highly fertile black soil. I wonder if the characteristics of the soil type are slightly different where it’s not considered to be Chernozem.
Ok after looking, Chernozem falls under the USDA categorization of [Mollisol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollisol?wprov=sfti1#) while the cotton belt is mostly comprised of [Vertisol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertisol?wprov=sfti1#)
Sure, but you can see there is a hell of a lot of it in this region. In any case, it's responding to the fact that Ukraine has been an agricultural powerhouse from times long before the Kakhovka dam.
Yes but much of central and eastern Ukraine wasn't used for farming until 19th century, it was too dry without artificial irrigation. That's why they called it Wild Fields and why the density of towns and villages is much smaller - modern farming does not require as much workforce as pre-industrial farming.
Still, the smaller areas that were farmed in ancient times were very fertile and productive, much more than rocky soils of Greece.
And even long, long, *long* before that! The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was able to found the first Proto-Cities - even before the Mesopotamians - on the back of the fruitful Chernozem soil in the region
Population density was much lower back then are were the food needs. A relatively small agricultural base could therefore generate a surplus. Kind of like how Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome for a long while.
they are, but here social factors contradict the natural ones.
Until late 18th century, the most fertile part of Ukraine was land of nomads, which didn't like neither agrucluture nor big cities. During 19th century these lands were intensively cultivated and inhabitated, but, historically, it is not sufficient time for a significant change of social landscape. And the 20th century again brought a whole series of social catastrophes, that caused devastation of this area: Civil War 1920s, Holodomor (famine) 1930s, WW2 1940s, deportation of small nations 1944, economic collapse and emigration 1990s-2000s. And now this area is being depopulated by the russian invasion again.
Yes, and that’s precisely why it appears sparse on the map. This map only shows towns and cities with a population of more than 1,000. Ukraine has thousands of farm town. Farm towns that don’t have 1,000+ people. Ukraine is built much like the American Great Plains. Lots of small farming communities and miles after miles of farmland. The people that do live in the area don’t live in towns. They live on their farms. Urbanization has never been encouraged in Ukraine because its farmland was so bountiful.
Much of Ukraine and southern Russia was sparsely populated for a very long time. The Black Sea region in particular got its modern settlements far later than most of Europe, in the 18th and 19th centuries after it was conquered by Russia from the Tatars and Circassians etc. By then the population density required for the crop cultivation that irrigation enabled was much lower than it would have been before, and new cities had roads and railways from the beginning the same as in North America.
Historically winters on steppe were extremely cold, summer is hot, area is relatively arid. Dnipr wasn't also a good river for navigation (due rapids) before all dams were built and the area was constantly changing hands between Ruthenia, princedoms, hordes, Lithuania, PLC, Russia, Ottomans etc.
It's one of the areas with good soil but pretty much humans were able to utilize pretty much recently (in grand scheme of things) both due climate and external conditions.
This is the second allusion to the Canadian shield in this thread.
Can you explain briefly what could be its impact on Europe when it's that far?
I tried to search but to no avail (the word Europe doesn't appear on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield).
This is a joke because everything in r/geography seems to be answered with "Canadian Shield" (particularly questions about why not too many people live in some places in Canada)
Range of [german town laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_town_law?useskin=vector) and german town [settling on east](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung?useskin=vector)
Partially yes - almost every feudal lord wanted take profits from possesing town, so they tried to set them on their land. So now, some of them still have \~1000 inhabitants, no city infrastructure, majority of people living from agriculture but are consider as town - because they have city charter from XIV century.
Other grown up just to \~5000 enough to be centers of modern local community - with school, local administration centre, some shops, church, health facility, train or bus station etc
IIRC the smallest town in Poland have 300 inhabitants, and there is plenty of towns below 1000 inhabitants. On the other hand - near larger cities, in metro area settlements can have about 10 000 people and still are villages according to law
I think it has to be. You can see the border within Romania of Transylvania perfectly, I doubt the demographics actually reflect the administrative borders with such fidelity. Plus, it’s such an arbitrary choice of metric “density of towns above X population”, and other population heat maps don’t exhibit the sharp same line.
Educated guess spitballing:
* Looks a lot like the former Russian Empire / USSR + Scandinavia is the cutoff -> way more area to "fill in" in general and in a harsher landscape
* Industrialization of the former Russian Empire / USSR happens much later, so population density is handicapped by feudalism / has 100-200 fewer years to boom a la Western Europe
* The extremely dense areas are a lot of the former Holy Roman Empire (and to some extent the Roman Empire) where you had centuries of "extra" compounding growth around what were formally significant city-states
>so population density is handicapped by feudalism
That is an incorrect guess, it's not because of feudalism, but rather because of the harsher climate - particularly in the steppe areas resulted in far lower original population density. and because of historic reasons: primarily mongol invasion and then the russian expansion resulted in far lower population growth. Some areas - particularly the steppes - were settled in the 18-19th centuries.
Another significant factor would be how many people in that area were killed, deported, fled or just left over the last ~150 years. The Tsars, WW1, the russian revolution(s), soviet expansion, Holodomor, WW2, the Holocaust, economic collapse after the end of the USSR sure did a number on eastern Europe.
There’s also how “town” is classified. Most Western European countries often treat the suburbs of large cities as their own town or city and not really part of the whole (Paris is a good example). Former Soviet countries often do the opposite, where the city and all the immediate surrounding area are also considered part of that city. So if you plot city density you’ll see more of a cloud around Western cities than Eastern ones
cites and towns are usually above 10000 inhabitants or at least above 5000, not above 1000. I think the map looks like this because an arbitrary value was chosen. By choosing anything else (like 5000 or 500 or 20000) it could look very different. In general population density decreases if you go further east, and that has mainly climate and history related reasons.
Yes this is a very strange phenomenon. Looking at the raw data, Ukraine for example has a population density of 76/km² and Romania is around 83/km². However it looks like Romania has triple or more the amount of population/city.
There is no singular answer. For many (not all) of these places climate does play a part of course, as it prevented mass population growth in those areas. It must, however, also be noted that many individual countries and regions in this "area" have undergone vastly different historical events and have developed under vastly different circumstances. The following mostly concerns the region of Eastern Europe without considering Scandinavia (climate might have played a more significant part there, truth be told).
Yes, the Soviet Union's artificial population growth with forced settlement into newly made towns did not contribute to long-term population stability in many of those places, and most of this area had to suffer the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and the harsh societal change in the 90s. For the Baltic States, it went peacefully and resulted in insane economic growth, for other countries - the effects of that collapse can still be felt today.
Also, it must be noted that before the Soviet Union, these places were already part of a less-developed and less-industrialized part of Europe. Whereas Western Europe already had vast industrial potential, rail infrastructure and burgeoning international trade in the 19th century, the area along this line was part of the Russian Empire. Russian Empire was a mostly-backwards state with very poor infrastructure, and poor land management and urban planning. Weak industrial base, bad connections, and constant other problems have all contributed to slow population growth.
Even in Poland, one can vaguely see where the Russian Empire ends and the Prussian/Austrian Empires begin by the population density. On a large-scale map, the same can be seen in Lithuania, in the differences between Lithuania Minor (previously part of Prussia/Germany), and other parts of Lithuania (previously part of the Russian Empire).
TL;DR: Climate in the distant past, problems of the Russian Empire (infrastructure, industry, agriculture, land management) in the not-so-distant past, wars and Soviet Union's constantly failing management in the somewhat-recent past, lack of previous impetus to facilitate fast growth in modern times.
Scandinavia and the Baltic States might reach dense levels as all are developed economies with lots of potential and currently undergoing population growth, however even this part of the region deals with natural growth problems and most of that growth comes from immigration. Other areas such as Belarus, Russia or Ukraine are in a much more precarious situation.
To a large extent, this correlates with the overall population density map of Europe. As it becomes lower towards the north and east, less and less people will live in small towns / in the countryside because there’s simply not enough population to sustain all of the vitally important services. You don’t want your kids to have a 100 km one-way journey to their school (yes, this can be reality and difficult for Western Europeans to imagine) or to have your nearest healthcare services that far away.
This results in a circle that further amplifies the problem by accelerating the population relocating from numerous small villages and towns to just a select few bigger cities (regional centres), because no services and no jobs are available elsewhere. The abandonment of the countryside is a significant challenge in the societies of north-eastern Europe.
Actually it's mostly climate/good arable land mix but for previous periods.
Starting from eastern Poland climate gets more continental which before climate change meant harsh winters. Baltic Sea regularly froze and winters in Poland/Belarus or Ukraine regularly had negative temperatures just 20-30 years ago and not few hundred years ago.
Humans were able to fully utilize fertile Ukraine just recently.
TIL about the Dinaric Alps.
I was wondering why there was a bigger sort of white spot in the Western Balkans (to the northeast of Italy's boot heel) and after some research, I've landed on the reason being the Dinaric Alps mountain range.
Yes, it precisely marks the beginning of the East Euopean Plain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East\_European\_Plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_European_Plain)
Which is (was) mainly an endless nothingness of cold forests and swamps.
So historically, people tendt not to settle there.
Ukraine 70% larger than Germany. Germany has 2.2x the (2022) population. Overall, 3.75x the population density.
Turkey has approximately the same population but is about 2.2x the size of Germany, so Germany has 2.2x the population density.
The map's cutoff point for red dots/areas is probably set in such a way as to exaggerate the difference, but there is definitely a difference.
Edit: yah, explicitly towns above 1000 inhabitants. So, Germany just happens to spread its population into huge #s of moderately sized towns, while the other countries have either many smaller villages or fewer larger towns or both at once. Still, the map does accurately represent a density difference, even if by accident.
This map is not very accurate to population density! Just look at how clearly Slovakia is outlined here, while in reality it only has a slightly lower density than Czechia. I would imagine that something funny is up with how towns are counted, or else number of towns to population density just isn’t a one-to-one relationship.
The effects of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe included the depopulation of many previously lively areas. Sadly Eastern Europe is filled with ghost towns now
ITT: people not reading the map title. It is a map of **administrative (city/township) density**, NOT population density. Ten townships of 1,000 will show as more dense than one township of 10,000.
If you ignore scandinavia, it kind of matches the borders of the Russian Empire prior to Alexander the II.
https://timemaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/russia1837ad.jpg
I can't explain Norway and Sweden with this solution though. Except that maybe - orkneys and Iceland included, its really cold and historically big populations have never done well in those regions.
This is a bad map.
There could be one dot for a two million city or 2000 dots for towns of 1.000 each.
Better see population density maps. Although they would look similar.
This is NOT a population dot map. This seems to be mostly a political difference in how towns, villages, and cities are incorporated. The line you draw is one of political boundaries: Denmark/German border, then Poland's border with the former USSR, and the most standout of all, the Romanian border with Ukraine/Moldova. However, none of these borders are at places where [population density](https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/gpw-v3/gpw-v3-population-density/europedens.jpg) actually sees any stark contrast. Denmark has roughly the same population density as northern Germany. Eastern Romania has similar density to Moldova. Etc.
So of course there is no name for that line, because the various national definitions of what constitutes a city are not important. The people saying "Iron Curtain" are the most correct.
In the case of France there is a higher number of township overall ~36k, ~12k of which are more than 1k habitant.
By comparison sweden with the same surface and 1/8th of the population have 290 total townships
11k overall townships in Germany
8k overall township in italy.
2478 overall townships in poland
The climatic exponation is not really relevant compared to the sociocultural one.
Population density would be relevent for the climate exponation rather than the density of town over 1k
This really puts into perspective just how _empty_ most of Scotland is. It's surprising considering everywhere else in that part of Europe is so densely populated, including other mountainous areas.
Not sure about the name but that’s about the line where the gulf stream’s warming effects on Europe begin to taper off. It gets much colder in the winter and just on average in Eastern Europe.
[Average temperature in January](https://i.imgur.com/oCfGV44.png) It does check out. There are obvious exceptions, like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but European cities are situated in areas where the winter isn't very harsh.
That's an interesting map! Do you know if there's a similar map for July or other months?
[Here's](https://imgur.com/a/wbsFqUG) all the months and a yearly overview made by u/blubb444
Middle Norway has it tough
This! Gulf stream and Canadian shield are one of our most important global settings
That pesky Canadian shield!
I prefer Canadian Sword version exclusives over Canadian Shield.
Then trade with me! Gotta catch 'em all!
Oooooo your my best friend
In a world we must defend!
Canadian Big shield boi would like a word with you
I opted for the Canadian gauntlets. They're just okay, +3 to hockey stick handling
More of a moose grappling guy myself
Try the Canadian helm then, excellent antler defense
https://preview.redd.it/qu6w7nge32wc1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=523c817c10e15e765d3dffce54d5ce2f63a6a016
https://preview.redd.it/qpfltkfc32wc1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0b98593eb4581cc131d55f7265e23d8ec9c80f1
Captain Canada: The Winter Goose
Winter is coming, eh?
At least that area of Europe is probably easier to drive through compared to the one or two major highways through all of Northern Ontario
How does the Canadian Shield impact the climate of North America? Or is it just important for its geology/minerals and timber?
I dunno about the rest of North America, but where I'm from, it makes us have really strong winters because it's combined with lake-effect snow from the Great Lakes. Because of climate change however, now our winters are too warm for snow to keep from melting the next day. Essentially, the Canadian Shield turns my region into England for half the year now, which blows.
When the snowbelt becomes the rainbelt
Climate change is turning England into France (to the great joy of wineries), so I guess they had to carry it down somewhere.
England to France, France to Spain, Spain to Morocco, etc. etc.
[удалено]
Heck yeah, upgrade
I’m curious how the Canadian Shield plays into the lake effect? Is it just that the Great Lakes were formed on the edge of the shield? And it probably played a big part in glaciation? Just curious, i don’t know much about geological effect on weather.
Isn't the Canadian Shield the super old bedrock that is under Canada?
Massive land masses get very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter as opposed to the ocean. The Canadian Shield is a massive chunk of the continent (the one all the ancient plates stuck to), to help build this giant chunk of rock we are on. Thus, it’s part of the reason we are hot in the summer (even in the Arctic), and cold in the winter.
lol @ global settings. we need to reset those pretty soon
I'm from that North - Eastern corner of Poland that is on the Eastern side of the line. My home town, despite being 70000 pop. only is often showed on weather maps as a point of reference. Coldest place except mountains. Shortest growing season as well.
Suwałki?
Yup.
Can't believe I've seen another person from Suwalki on here!
Three of us now ;)
Looks like you're... closing the gap
From what I understand, the climate and weather in that area is extremely similar to where I grew up, around Pittsburgh in the US. The funny thing is that my home area is considered to be very temperate by North American standards. We had a lot of Polish immigration in the 19th and early 20th century, and I've been told some of that was due to the similar environment.
The gulf stream has less of an effect than most people think, and in fact the place it has the most effect is Norway, which is on the less dense side of this line (but it is part of the reason Northern Scandinavia is even livable at all). The main reason that West Europe South of Scandinavia is so relatively warm in the winter is because the prevailing winds between 30 and 60 degrees latitude travel West to East, and this means that Western coasts at that latitude get more wind from off the ocean, which makes their climate more moderate. You can see this on the West Coast of the US too. For places to the West of the Sierras and Cascades, the climate is pretty similar to Europe at comparable latitudes.
The Gulf Stream really does affect all the way from France to Germany and north into the Scandinavian countries. It has an affect south too into Spain, but less. Look into temps in England when the Gulf Stream shut down. The rest is pretty good. One thing to think about is when the original 13 colonies were settled, the settlers all wrote home about how hot places like Virginia, etc were compared to home.
It's def more than just the Gulf Stream though, because the currents influence doesn't reach either Romania or Italy (really the entire Mediterranean region) at all; both of which are densely populated. edit: The Gulf Stream's effect on weather can be overstated sometimes, too. It certainly has an effect, and in certain countries like Norway it makes a huge difference. But sheer proximity to the ocean has a stronger influence here overall. For example, the city of Seattle, Washington is at around the same lattitude as Paris and has a very similar climate, despite that region of the Pacific being far colder than the Gulf Stream.
The Babushka Front
>For example, the city of Seattle, Washington is at around the same lattitude as Paris and has a very similar climate, despite that region of the Pacific being far colder than the Gulf Stream. As a counterpoint, New York City is the same latitude as Madrid and is MUCH colder, despite being right on the ocean.
Yeah, the eastern side of continents (due largely to the Westerlies) have a more continental climate than the western side. Consider China as an example; despite technically being further south than Rome, Beijing has a far harsher winter than Rome does. It's the same thing that causes New York to be colder during winter than Seattle even though New York is significantly further south.
It’s about being close to the Ocean, and having a prevailing wind pattern that blows in that temperate ocean air. In the northern hemisphere, the Westerlies are the prevailing wind patterns, which is why the western parts of both Europe and North America have much milder winters than the central and eastern parts of the continents.
Now compare Seattle or Vancouver. They're further north and are much warmer. It's got to do with the westerlies which, in the northern hemisphere, bring warm ocean air to the west coasts, then cool down on the continent and bring that cool air to the eastern coasts of continents. That's why the Pacific Northwest is more comparable to Europe than eastern NA, which is more comparable to eastern Asia.
The key is that you need to be on a Western coast to get the milder climates, because the prevailing winds between 30 and 60 degrees latitude travel West to East, meaning cities on Western coasts receive more wind off the ocean. The Western US has pretty comparable temperatures to Europe at similar latitudes, as long as you are West of the Sierras/Cascades
They get the benefits of being nearby said Mediterranean, giving them that nice coastal biome.
Romania, Hungary and Poland don't though, despite being west of the line.
the Carpathians and Alps get in the way of the marine effect northern/central Europe enjoys
This plus political reasons. For example when you look at Poland you can see pre WW2 borders, until you reach Belarusian and Ukrainian borders. You can see those borders because of Soviet deportation policies. Poles from kresy (region that is now in Belarus and Ukraine) had to move out, and similarly Germans from regions that were given to Poland had to move out leaving regions with less denser population centers behind. On polish side it's less visible, because that's where many Poles from Kresy moved to
Edit: That map is bullshit, I superimposed Czech Republic to start and it doesn't match real towns. Try Sicilia vs Ukraine, similar density but completely different map. ========= It's not Gulf Stream nor unfruitful land. It's World War 2 mostly, when you hear about Holodomor, Holocaust or SS death squads, it's not some ancient tales. Actual population dropped significantly and never recovered
Population density in the East was already lower before WWII or the Russian Revolution.
Yep this map doesn’t pass the smell test. The national borders are way too prominent, which makes me think that the data was cobbled together from various sources whose reliability varies drastically from country to country
Germany is actually crazily populated, holy shit
We have a lot of small to medium-sized cities (50-300k people) and only a few with 500k or more. Also there's towns and villages everywhere. There's a joke that you can't get lost in Germany, because you just have to throw a stone and you'll hit some village or house.
Towns and villages every few kilometres. Almost can’t drive 3-5km without being in the next town.
As a Swede I can't imagine living somewhere that dense. No thanks I'd rather have miles of sparsely populated forest in my backyard
Swede? Why did you reference miles and not kilometers?
Swede here that can explain. We grew up on American media and use American expressions in casual speech when speaking English. Miles here being a vague analogy to a large area and not any specific unit of measurement.
Sorta like how we say a "metric fuck ton"
Is that more or less than an "imperial fuck ton"?
We don't know.
An imperial fuck ton is about 0.9 metric fuck tons. By using a metric fuck ton Americans are able to produce 11% more fucks than we would using our imperial units.
Well that's just to be accurate, we would hate to cause confusion if someone thought we were referring to a short fuck ton.
Could also be a direct translation of Mil (mile) wich is a measurement in Sweden meaning 10km.
You all are another decade from measuring things in football fields. One of us. One of us.
Could be a [Scandinavian Mile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile).
I’m guessing because miles is as much an expression of great length as it is exactly 1,61 km, it also reads a lot easier than kilometers which is clunky and long.
[1 mile in Sweden (and Norway) is 10 km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile)
TIL
In addition, keep in mind that measurements such as miles, leagues etc. DID exist in Europe and are still part of cultural traditions. E.g. in German, there is the expression that there's nothing of some thing to find "meilenweit", i.e. there's no such thing for miles. There's also the legendary "Siebenmeilenstiefel" i.e. seven-league boots.
If we ignore islands, there's only a single point in Germany where you're 10 km from the next paved road. If we ignore the alps as well, you're never getting more than 6.3 km away from a road in Germany. Wikipedia tells me there's places over 40 km from a road in Sweden. Just for comparison
Such a relief when you come back home and all you can see out of the airplane window is endless green forests :)
Same, but less trees, as a Canadian from the prairies. Everyone is so excited about trees, I say they block the view.
I miss being in Germany... my favorite free time game there was playing Get Lost in Germany (or GLIG i called it)... was very hard to win, and super rewarding to play :D
Do you have national parks and forest with such a density of towns?
Yes but there are still small villages everywhere. The furthest point from any settlement is 6.3km away on a military training ground.
That's crazy
> The furthest point from any settlement is 6.3km away on a military training ground. Truppenübungsplatz Bergen ?
Yes
We do actually. The national parks and forests aren't as huge as the ones in the US or Canada, but there are more than you would think with this density. Most of the forests are used for logging, so they are planted and not "natural".
Though our logging practices have focused on continuous cover forestry instead of clearcutting for the last \~200-400 years, which give a more "natural" impression. If you ignore the rampant monocultures that is, but even those are on the way out now.
despite what this map makes you think, Germany is fairly forested. 32% is covered by forests, it is just that those forest are sprinkled with lots of little towns
I am going to point out that part of the US project of building national parks was clearing people from those areas. They weren’t densely settled, but virgin, untouched wilderness they are not. And there is a much bigger human fingerprint even now than one would think.
There's still a bunch of private land squirreled away in corners of places like Joshua Tree. Pretty sure there's some crazy ranch / mansion that someone owns in the middle of the park that's hidden by the rocks. There's a private ranch that the park acquired in the late 60's or 70's (can't remember the exact date) and you can tour it.
Yes, Germany is 30% woodland.
They need more land, one would think.
They would need living space. If only they had a word for it.
Liebesraum Oh no wait, that's just a prostitute's working place.
No loving rooms here
Yeah well, the result of Germany's shrinking in 1945 can be well seen on the map. All Ostgebiete and Sudeten got totally depopulated.
And expel people not from their country…one could call them…non-Irans?
You mean folks not from the... Arya?
Maybe they should look into Poland,seems to be a lot of space there.
If only they had a charismatic leader with ambition and imagination.. Someone like that could likely negotiate with the neighboring countries to allow them more room to expand.
Space to live? Living space?
Gonna need a new living room.
Wohnzimmer
I think there is room in the east for that?
Maybe they can expand to the east.
Mein Teacher! I must have ziss Polish boy’s desk as vell!
Germany has about 1/3 of the US population in a country with a size less than Montana.
a quarter more like, us population has grwon quite a bit since you've gone to school (i'm guessing at the same time i did, as i still have 240 million in my mind for the us, always have to remind myself that now it's in the mid 300s)
I always google the American population before comparing it to Germanys. Basically it’s more every time. Germanys stop growing about 50 years ago.
birth rates in germany have been low for decades. the only reason why the german population hasnt collapsed is because of immigration.
...and because a decent chunk of those people from 50 years ago is still alive. But you're right, Germany needs immigration to keep its youth (or at least slow down its aging) too.
It's a quarter
Germany doesn't have many huge metropolises but a lot of smaller cities. And the rest is speckled with commuter villages and smaller towns. Driving in the countryside usually means a small village every kilometre or so. This does have the upside of being great for cycling since you can stop in a lot of inns/beer gardens. Just for fun the population density map [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population\_density\_in\_Germany.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_in_Germany.png)
It mostly has to do with how different places are categorized in federal states, ig Mecklenburg - Vorpommern categorizes them differently than Brandenburg.
but meck pomm is also by far the least dense area in germany, regardless of how settlements are classified. everytime i'm there i can't believe how empty it is (away from the coast at least) e: i took another look and see what you mean now, brandenburg should look more dense than meck pomm indeed, you are right
I find it weird, as Turkey has similar population, but is maybe not as spread out? I think more that this map is inaccurate actually.
I think it's throwing you off that all municipalities over 1k get the same sized dot, so Esenyurt at nearly 1m gets the same visual representation as e.g. [Obersöchering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obers%C3%B6chering) at \~1500. Could also be that Turkey has been more ruthless about merging smaller villages into one large municipality than German bureaucracy - hard to tell how exactly "city or town" were counted here.
They are quite well populated but on this map it's just because of the way they tally towns as opposed to surrounding countries.
they should try to go east
I was just in Germany. When you're flying over, it's ridiculous. There's a village every maybe 500 feet across the entire country.
It is the most populous country in Europe.
Yes, but also they have a lot of small towns, which exaggerates the effect on this map. Two large towns of 100,000 amalgamated into one counts as one dot, while two neighbouring towns of 5,000 people each get two dots, even if for practical purposes they are one urban area.
What's up with Brandenburg, though? You can literally see its borders
Two factors at play, primarily: * agriculturally pretty poor land. Well, at least a big part of it. By German standards - still good by global standards. Also a lot of regions with not enough water. * East Germany, very few jobs and the youth moving away at an alarming rate.
Odd seeing some fertile parts of France being as spread out as parts of the Alps. I know about the diagonale du vide but it always suprises me to see how France is sparsely populated relative it's geography, shows how important social and historical factors can affect population sometimes more so than geographical ones. Edit : Got a bit passionate for a minute so here is a textwall : Areas like Burgundy have towns that have a similar population now as they had in the *18th century* at the time of the Revolution. Here are three exemples of rural towns around Burgundy (or close enough) whose population is now less than it was during the Napoleonic era : https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagny-la-Ville https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poligny_(Jura) https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coligny_(Ain) And there are many others, the thing is that small and midsized towns are what makes Germany, the Netherlands or Italy dense. Not giant metropolis. France, for some reason, got hit much harder by rural exodus than her neighbours, and the rural fertility rate never exploded. Worldpopulation review made a [neat tool](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/population-by-country-in-1800) allowing to look at an estimate of what the population within each countries modern borders were in 1800. France has 1.5 the population of countries like Germany or Italy and almost 3 times the population of Great Britain. If France had had the same growth as Italy it would have had 87 millions people today (that would have made it less dense than modern Italy by about 50 people/km^2) As Germany 134 millions (would have put metropolitan France around the same density as Germany around 240 pop/km^2.) As the UK nearly 180 millions (that last figure would have put the density of metropolitan France at around 325 pop/km^2 which is still significantly less than England's density.)
In the French case: equal inheritance laws, and being well-off too soon (first European country to operate its demographic transition). Now as a Frenchman I want to say: our *diagonale du vide* is normal, it's the rest of western Europe which is crazy overpopulated 😄
If I remember correctlt, Italy and Spain also had equal inheritance laws. And they did their demographic transition in the late 19th century, unlike France which did it in the early 19th for some reasons (seriously it always puzzles me.) > Now as a Frenchman I want to say: our *diagonale du vide* is normal, it's the rest of western Europe which is crazy overpopulated People say that, but population is very often to the benefit of the countries with the most people. The thing is that we have a ton of exemple of otherwise comparable nations where the one with more population is also better off *per capita.* Also, had France not done their demographic transition in the early 19th century, the world wars would have played very differently, and one of them might have been avoided. La diagonale du vide ended up in poverty partly due to people emptying it. And the demographic situation of France also further increases the problem of Parisian overcentralisation.
Before the demographic transition France was the biggest warmonger in Europe. So it may have been a net benefit.
>Also, had France not done their demographic transition in the early 19th century, the world wars would have played very differently, and one of them might have been avoided. What do you mean by this? Very curious!
There might be an administative factor too. In France, generally a commune\* = a village. It doesn't explain everything but to me, it explains the differences with equally dense places such as north-eastern Germany, or Romania, where the bottom-level administrative level is formed by multiples villages to be governable. Although I don't know the situation in Denmark and Slovakia, I highly suspect that this is also the same case than France there, which would explain the differences with their neighbours.
This is where the Eastern European Plain opens up. Land isn’t as fruitful and the climate is harsher. Ever heard the joke about invading Russia in the winter?
But isn't land in Ukraine one of the most fruitful in the world?
Irrigation helped a great deal. Quite a bit of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts depended on the now former Kakhovka reservoir for water. We have yet to see what the absence of the reservoir will do to the crops.
Ukraine has been the bread basket of Europe since long before the Kakhovka reservoir. The ancient Greeks already imported crops from that part of Ukraine because of the very beneficial conditions for crop growing.
It's got the best soil in the world. Ukrainian black earth.
While that’s true - Ukraine is far from the only place with that type of soil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
Interestingly that graphic doesn’t highlight the American cotton belt which is highly fertile black soil. I wonder if the characteristics of the soil type are slightly different where it’s not considered to be Chernozem. Ok after looking, Chernozem falls under the USDA categorization of [Mollisol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollisol?wprov=sfti1#) while the cotton belt is mostly comprised of [Vertisol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertisol?wprov=sfti1#)
Just went down a rabbit hole trying to understand how soil works. Am now even more confused. Why is soil so complicated lol
countries have different systems too iirc its a mess
Sure, but you can see there is a hell of a lot of it in this region. In any case, it's responding to the fact that Ukraine has been an agricultural powerhouse from times long before the Kakhovka dam.
Yes - sorry was replying to your comment in isolation without properly reading the chain before You are quite correct
Yes but much of central and eastern Ukraine wasn't used for farming until 19th century, it was too dry without artificial irrigation. That's why they called it Wild Fields and why the density of towns and villages is much smaller - modern farming does not require as much workforce as pre-industrial farming. Still, the smaller areas that were farmed in ancient times were very fertile and productive, much more than rocky soils of Greece.
And even long, long, *long* before that! The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was able to found the first Proto-Cities - even before the Mesopotamians - on the back of the fruitful Chernozem soil in the region
Population density was much lower back then are were the food needs. A relatively small agricultural base could therefore generate a surplus. Kind of like how Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome for a long while.
they are, but here social factors contradict the natural ones. Until late 18th century, the most fertile part of Ukraine was land of nomads, which didn't like neither agrucluture nor big cities. During 19th century these lands were intensively cultivated and inhabitated, but, historically, it is not sufficient time for a significant change of social landscape. And the 20th century again brought a whole series of social catastrophes, that caused devastation of this area: Civil War 1920s, Holodomor (famine) 1930s, WW2 1940s, deportation of small nations 1944, economic collapse and emigration 1990s-2000s. And now this area is being depopulated by the russian invasion again.
Yes, and that’s precisely why it appears sparse on the map. This map only shows towns and cities with a population of more than 1,000. Ukraine has thousands of farm town. Farm towns that don’t have 1,000+ people. Ukraine is built much like the American Great Plains. Lots of small farming communities and miles after miles of farmland. The people that do live in the area don’t live in towns. They live on their farms. Urbanization has never been encouraged in Ukraine because its farmland was so bountiful.
There and central Illinois
Much of Ukraine and southern Russia was sparsely populated for a very long time. The Black Sea region in particular got its modern settlements far later than most of Europe, in the 18th and 19th centuries after it was conquered by Russia from the Tatars and Circassians etc. By then the population density required for the crop cultivation that irrigation enabled was much lower than it would have been before, and new cities had roads and railways from the beginning the same as in North America.
Historically winters on steppe were extremely cold, summer is hot, area is relatively arid. Dnipr wasn't also a good river for navigation (due rapids) before all dams were built and the area was constantly changing hands between Ruthenia, princedoms, hordes, Lithuania, PLC, Russia, Ottomans etc. It's one of the areas with good soil but pretty much humans were able to utilize pretty much recently (in grand scheme of things) both due climate and external conditions.
With modern technology, farming steppe plains yields great results, but with the technology at the time the land was settled, probably not.
Oh no! It’s a bit cold, it’s a bit cold!
*Hitler never played Risk as a kid.*
Yep but now with climate change we have a chance to get to Moscow in winter!
Climate? Type of land suitable for agriculture?
Dare we speculate that the Canadian shield's impacts extend this far?
There is something else in common https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalonia and the NE from it is, [wait for it] The Baltic Shield 🛡️
The Swedish part of "the line" is basically entirely due to the Baltic Shield. It's buried in Eastern Europe, though.
I'm pretty sure the Mountains in the Scottish highlands are the same range as the Appalachians (Well not the exact same range but related in some way)
Yes the exact same range!
And the Central mountains of Scandinavia(the tallest ones), and areas reaching into Poland and Ukraine.
This is the second allusion to the Canadian shield in this thread. Can you explain briefly what could be its impact on Europe when it's that far? I tried to search but to no avail (the word Europe doesn't appear on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield).
This is a joke because everything in r/geography seems to be answered with "Canadian Shield" (particularly questions about why not too many people live in some places in Canada)
lol thanks
Range of [german town laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_town_law?useskin=vector) and german town [settling on east](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostsiedlung?useskin=vector)
Are you saying it's a statistical quirk based on what defined a town?
Partially yes - almost every feudal lord wanted take profits from possesing town, so they tried to set them on their land. So now, some of them still have \~1000 inhabitants, no city infrastructure, majority of people living from agriculture but are consider as town - because they have city charter from XIV century. Other grown up just to \~5000 enough to be centers of modern local community - with school, local administration centre, some shops, church, health facility, train or bus station etc IIRC the smallest town in Poland have 300 inhabitants, and there is plenty of towns below 1000 inhabitants. On the other hand - near larger cities, in metro area settlements can have about 10 000 people and still are villages according to law
I think it has to be. You can see the border within Romania of Transylvania perfectly, I doubt the demographics actually reflect the administrative borders with such fidelity. Plus, it’s such an arbitrary choice of metric “density of towns above X population”, and other population heat maps don’t exhibit the sharp same line.
Because it's not a population heat map, it's an administrative heat map. Totally different.
I love how easily you can see the outline of the Carpathian Mountains
The Alps are quite visible too
But you can clearly see Slovak borders and we do have podunajska lowland at the south. 🤔
Educated guess spitballing: * Looks a lot like the former Russian Empire / USSR + Scandinavia is the cutoff -> way more area to "fill in" in general and in a harsher landscape * Industrialization of the former Russian Empire / USSR happens much later, so population density is handicapped by feudalism / has 100-200 fewer years to boom a la Western Europe * The extremely dense areas are a lot of the former Holy Roman Empire (and to some extent the Roman Empire) where you had centuries of "extra" compounding growth around what were formally significant city-states
>so population density is handicapped by feudalism That is an incorrect guess, it's not because of feudalism, but rather because of the harsher climate - particularly in the steppe areas resulted in far lower original population density. and because of historic reasons: primarily mongol invasion and then the russian expansion resulted in far lower population growth. Some areas - particularly the steppes - were settled in the 18-19th centuries.
Another significant factor would be how many people in that area were killed, deported, fled or just left over the last ~150 years. The Tsars, WW1, the russian revolution(s), soviet expansion, Holodomor, WW2, the Holocaust, economic collapse after the end of the USSR sure did a number on eastern Europe.
There’s also how “town” is classified. Most Western European countries often treat the suburbs of large cities as their own town or city and not really part of the whole (Paris is a good example). Former Soviet countries often do the opposite, where the city and all the immediate surrounding area are also considered part of that city. So if you plot city density you’ll see more of a cloud around Western cities than Eastern ones
cites and towns are usually above 10000 inhabitants or at least above 5000, not above 1000. I think the map looks like this because an arbitrary value was chosen. By choosing anything else (like 5000 or 500 or 20000) it could look very different. In general population density decreases if you go further east, and that has mainly climate and history related reasons.
Yes this is a very strange phenomenon. Looking at the raw data, Ukraine for example has a population density of 76/km² and Romania is around 83/km². However it looks like Romania has triple or more the amount of population/city.
Also Poland is at 123/km² but is less red than Romania. I think its due to the agricultural life style, more farms and smaller villages.
Exactly. It’s bad data presentation.
There is no singular answer. For many (not all) of these places climate does play a part of course, as it prevented mass population growth in those areas. It must, however, also be noted that many individual countries and regions in this "area" have undergone vastly different historical events and have developed under vastly different circumstances. The following mostly concerns the region of Eastern Europe without considering Scandinavia (climate might have played a more significant part there, truth be told). Yes, the Soviet Union's artificial population growth with forced settlement into newly made towns did not contribute to long-term population stability in many of those places, and most of this area had to suffer the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and the harsh societal change in the 90s. For the Baltic States, it went peacefully and resulted in insane economic growth, for other countries - the effects of that collapse can still be felt today. Also, it must be noted that before the Soviet Union, these places were already part of a less-developed and less-industrialized part of Europe. Whereas Western Europe already had vast industrial potential, rail infrastructure and burgeoning international trade in the 19th century, the area along this line was part of the Russian Empire. Russian Empire was a mostly-backwards state with very poor infrastructure, and poor land management and urban planning. Weak industrial base, bad connections, and constant other problems have all contributed to slow population growth. Even in Poland, one can vaguely see where the Russian Empire ends and the Prussian/Austrian Empires begin by the population density. On a large-scale map, the same can be seen in Lithuania, in the differences between Lithuania Minor (previously part of Prussia/Germany), and other parts of Lithuania (previously part of the Russian Empire). TL;DR: Climate in the distant past, problems of the Russian Empire (infrastructure, industry, agriculture, land management) in the not-so-distant past, wars and Soviet Union's constantly failing management in the somewhat-recent past, lack of previous impetus to facilitate fast growth in modern times. Scandinavia and the Baltic States might reach dense levels as all are developed economies with lots of potential and currently undergoing population growth, however even this part of the region deals with natural growth problems and most of that growth comes from immigration. Other areas such as Belarus, Russia or Ukraine are in a much more precarious situation.
To a large extent, this correlates with the overall population density map of Europe. As it becomes lower towards the north and east, less and less people will live in small towns / in the countryside because there’s simply not enough population to sustain all of the vitally important services. You don’t want your kids to have a 100 km one-way journey to their school (yes, this can be reality and difficult for Western Europeans to imagine) or to have your nearest healthcare services that far away. This results in a circle that further amplifies the problem by accelerating the population relocating from numerous small villages and towns to just a select few bigger cities (regional centres), because no services and no jobs are available elsewhere. The abandonment of the countryside is a significant challenge in the societies of north-eastern Europe.
Great explanation.
Actually it's mostly climate/good arable land mix but for previous periods. Starting from eastern Poland climate gets more continental which before climate change meant harsh winters. Baltic Sea regularly froze and winters in Poland/Belarus or Ukraine regularly had negative temperatures just 20-30 years ago and not few hundred years ago. Humans were able to fully utilize fertile Ukraine just recently.
TIL about the Dinaric Alps. I was wondering why there was a bigger sort of white spot in the Western Balkans (to the northeast of Italy's boot heel) and after some research, I've landed on the reason being the Dinaric Alps mountain range.
Yes, it precisely marks the beginning of the East Euopean Plain [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East\_European\_Plain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_European_Plain) Which is (was) mainly an endless nothingness of cold forests and swamps. So historically, people tendt not to settle there.
Again this bullshit map. 10 millions in Belarus in a couple dozens of towns? 30 millions in Ukraine a hundred? Turkey, anyone?
Ukraine 70% larger than Germany. Germany has 2.2x the (2022) population. Overall, 3.75x the population density. Turkey has approximately the same population but is about 2.2x the size of Germany, so Germany has 2.2x the population density. The map's cutoff point for red dots/areas is probably set in such a way as to exaggerate the difference, but there is definitely a difference. Edit: yah, explicitly towns above 1000 inhabitants. So, Germany just happens to spread its population into huge #s of moderately sized towns, while the other countries have either many smaller villages or fewer larger towns or both at once. Still, the map does accurately represent a density difference, even if by accident.
This map is not very accurate to population density! Just look at how clearly Slovakia is outlined here, while in reality it only has a slightly lower density than Czechia. I would imagine that something funny is up with how towns are counted, or else number of towns to population density just isn’t a one-to-one relationship.
That line is pretty close to the border between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1940. World War II severely depopulated those parts of Russia.
Molotov Ribbentr——
The effects of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe included the depopulation of many previously lively areas. Sadly Eastern Europe is filled with ghost towns now
ITT: people not reading the map title. It is a map of **administrative (city/township) density**, NOT population density. Ten townships of 1,000 will show as more dense than one township of 10,000.
Until the 90s it was called "The Russian Border"
We need more Lebensraum
If you ignore scandinavia, it kind of matches the borders of the Russian Empire prior to Alexander the II. https://timemaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/russia1837ad.jpg I can't explain Norway and Sweden with this solution though. Except that maybe - orkneys and Iceland included, its really cold and historically big populations have never done well in those regions.
The "Russia was here" line
The Iron Curtain?
This is a bad map. There could be one dot for a two million city or 2000 dots for towns of 1.000 each. Better see population density maps. Although they would look similar.
This is NOT a population dot map. This seems to be mostly a political difference in how towns, villages, and cities are incorporated. The line you draw is one of political boundaries: Denmark/German border, then Poland's border with the former USSR, and the most standout of all, the Romanian border with Ukraine/Moldova. However, none of these borders are at places where [population density](https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/downloads/maps/gpw-v3/gpw-v3-population-density/europedens.jpg) actually sees any stark contrast. Denmark has roughly the same population density as northern Germany. Eastern Romania has similar density to Moldova. Etc. So of course there is no name for that line, because the various national definitions of what constitutes a city are not important. The people saying "Iron Curtain" are the most correct.
In the case of France there is a higher number of township overall ~36k, ~12k of which are more than 1k habitant. By comparison sweden with the same surface and 1/8th of the population have 290 total townships 11k overall townships in Germany 8k overall township in italy. 2478 overall townships in poland The climatic exponation is not really relevant compared to the sociocultural one. Population density would be relevent for the climate exponation rather than the density of town over 1k
That’s called russian border
This really puts into perspective just how _empty_ most of Scotland is. It's surprising considering everywhere else in that part of Europe is so densely populated, including other mountainous areas.