Friday, June 20, 2014

Illinois is More Flat than Kansas.

My yard is flat. The street is flat. The whole town is flat. There's this one road named Ridge nearby that is perhaps 5-10 feet higher in elevation than the rest of the area. But for someone who used to live in Boulder County, Colorado where there is about 10,000 vertical feet of total elevation differential, the "Ridge" at Ridge Avenue is barely noticeable.

According to the Chicago Tribune, "Illinois is flatter than every state but one, according to researchers, and is less hilly even than Kansas, a place once proven to be flatter than an IHOP pancake."

The Tribune article goes on to tell us about Jerome Dobson, a University of Kansas geographer, who set out to compare how flat states actually are with how flat people think they are. In a 2013 survey that asked Americans which state is flattest, a full third of respondents guessed Kansas. But Dobson’s team found that Florida, with its low-lying coastal plains, was the flattest of the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C.

And Illinois is second. It's more flat than Kansas. Truth.