[OC] Surface Area of EU Countries and U.S. States

30 comments
  1. Tools used: R, RStudio

    R Packages used: ggflags, ggplot2

    Sources:

    [Eurostat, 2015](https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/key-facts-and-figures/life-eu_en)

    [U.S. Census Bureau, 2010](https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/2010/geo/state-area.html)

    I did this while half asleep and being completely new to R, after seeing [a comment on Reddit claiming that every U.S. state is bigger than *any* European country](https://www.reddit.com/r/RhodeIsland/comments/sb87mk/they_eventually_got_there/), so please excuse my spaghetti code:

    `ggplot(data = us_eu_land, aes(y = reorder(GEO, +AREA), x = AREA)) + geom_col(aes(fill = FEDERAL), width = .8) + geom_flag(x = -48000, aes(country = FLAG), size = 10) + scale_fill_manual(values = c(“EU” = “#001489”, “US” = “#B31942”)) + expand_limits(x = -20000) + scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(from = 0, to = 2000000, by = 200000), sec.axis = dup_axis()) + ggtitle(“Surface Area of EU Countries and U.S. States”) + xlab(x_expression) + ylab(“”) + labs(fill = “”) + theme(legend.position=”top”, plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5), plot.margin = margin(20, 20, 20, 20, “pt”)) + labs(caption = “U.S. Census Bureau, 2010; Eurostat, 2015”) + theme(plot.caption = element_text(hjust = 0.5))`

    I also included U.S. territories as a bonus.

  2. I’m missing some countries, but to be fair, apart from Liechtenstein, they’re all city states.

  3. Makes you wonder how many people live in the wilderness as hermits off the grid in Alaska…

    I bet Siberia has a higher population density than that state.

  4. A reminder that France is massive.

    And also that even though roughly the same size, California have almost 4 times the population of Sweden.

  5. Great Britain (209km) would be just under Kansas (213km)

    And the UK (242km) is a little smaller than Michigan (250km)

  6. I don’t want to be that nerd but it seems like the flags of the Netherlands and Luxembourg got mixed up? I believe the Luxembourgish flag has brighter shades of red and blue and the Dutch flag darker shades of red and blue, but that seems to be swapped in this graph. Extremely pedantic, I know. Sorry lol

  7. OK we’re pretty conservative in some cases but putting us between Louisiana and Mississippi is honestly a little bit too much /s

  8. I have used California as measurement to explain to Americans that Sweden is not really that small. There are at least two problems with this, they either do not know the size of California or they do not consider California very large since it it just one state.

  9. Well, you can have a shit ton of space but who cares when it’s just desert. What matters is good quality land that you can use for farming.

  10. US:

    Any number of individual EU nations: yes but why can’t a nation the size of the failed Roman Empire have nice, agreeable government?

  11. Nice representation, however each State has its own flag. Why don’t you use these flags instead, as you did with EU countries?🤔

Leave a Reply