Which longitude separates Canada and Alaska ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 141° W. The long interior boundary between Alaska and Canada runs due north along the 141st meridian west, from Mount Saint Elias to the Beaufort Sea, separating Alaska from Canada's Yukon. It is one of the world's clearest examples of a geometric or artificial boundary — a line drawn on a map rather than one following a river, a ridge or a language. Its origin is the Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1825, the Anglo-Russian convention by which Britain and Russia divided their North American claims: the agreed line ran north and west to the 141st meridian west and then straight north to the 'Frozen Ocean'. When the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 it inherited that boundary unchanged, which is why a nineteenth-century agreement between two European empires still fixes an American frontier today. Only the southern coastal stretch — the Alaska panhandle, where the line follows the mountains behind the coast rather than a meridian — was disputed, and that was settled by the Alaska Boundary Tribunal in 1903. The meridian's reach extends offshore as well: Canada and the United States have taken different positions on the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea, with Canada arguing for the extension of the 141st meridian out to 200 nautical miles.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Ten degrees too far west — this meridian runs through the interior of Alaska itself, close to Anchorage and the Cook Inlet, hundreds of kilometres from any international boundary. It is the closest wrong option, which is exactly why the question offers four meridians ten degrees apart: they are indistinguishable to anyone guessing.  (c) Further west still, out in the thinly populated country of western Alaska towards the Bering Sea and the base of the Alaska Peninsula. Nothing about it is a boundary of any kind. At this longitude Alaska has no neighbour except the sea.  (d) Ten degrees east of the answer, which places it offshore in the Pacific to the west of British Columbia. The Alaska panhandle boundary in that latitude belt does not follow a meridian at all — it follows the line of mountains behind the coast, as fixed by the Alaska Boundary Tribunal in 1903.

Concept: Political boundaries are classified by what they follow. Natural or physical boundaries use a landscape feature — the Rio Grande between the United States and Mexico, the Pyrenees between France and Spain, Lake Victoria between Tanzania and Uganda. Geometric or artificial boundaries follow a line of latitude or longitude and pay no attention to the ground: the 141st meridian between Alaska and Yukon, the 49th parallel across most of the Canada-United States border, the 38th parallel that divided Korea in 1945, the 22nd parallel between Egypt and Sudan. Cultural boundaries follow language or religion. Geometric boundaries have a characteristic history — they are drawn by distant powers over territory neither side has mapped in detail, which is why they cluster in North America, Africa and the polar regions, and why they so often produce later disputes when the ground turns out not to match the paper. The Alaska case shows both halves of that pattern: the meridian portion has never been in serious dispute because a meridian is unambiguous, while the coastal portion, described in words rather than by a line, took until 1903 to settle.

State PCS 2025 Q83 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q83 — Geography PYQ with Answer