Science Teaser - 4

by Al deAprix, Jr.
c.2010

How Earth Science Contributed to an American Political Boundary Quirk

Too often, mapmakers have put political boundaries on maps without regard to geophysical or
cultural realities. Doing so has brought tragedy throughout history, as witnessed by the strife between
Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in Iraq, which can be blamed directly upon the lines drawn by the British and
French in the region following their victory in World War I; their spheres of influence in the areas of the
old Ottoman Empire shed by Turkey as a consequence of its membership in the defeated Austro-German
alliance took little account of ethnic and religious aspirations of the peoples living in those territories. Now
the United States is engaged in hostilities in that region that seem virtually impossible to resolve given the
boundaries imposed so long ago.
Sometimes, though, arbitrary boundaries possess little more consequence than being useful trivia
questions for school teachers. I spotted one of those (though I did not discover it because the people in that
state and the residents of the area live with that interesting piece of trivia every day). I had purchased a
particularly accurate wall map of the United States when I was in high school. While admiring my new
map, I discovered that there was one state that is divided into two noncontiguous parts by the land of either
one of two other states. The only way to drive, bike, boat, or walk from one part to the other is through the
territory of a second state.
The reason for this anomaly’s existence lies in earth science, but more on that in a moment. The
two parts of the state are not divided by water, as is the cases of Michigan and Virginia. It is also not a case
where islands are separated from the mainland, as with New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii, or other coastal
states. Can you guess which state is so divided? Hint: The smaller piece of the divided state is the size of
a modest township or city, so the search for it must be done carefully. An accurate atlas of wall map will
be needed, and a good measure of a map’s or atlas’s accuracy and attention to detail will lie in whether or
not this anomaly can be found using it. Some maps simply do not show it.
Earth science comes into the picture because the Mississippi River flows through areas of soft soil
that can be eroded away to create or cut off oxbows, which are distended loops in a river’s course. The
Mississippi River is subject to a considerable amount of such erosion as it flows through Tennessee,
Mississippi, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. I grew up along a smaller river that did much
the same thing. Our village part wraps around Collins Lake, which is an old, cut off oxbow that was
apparently created, then cut off, during the era when the Mohawk drained the eastern Great Lakes before
the St. Lawrence’s river course was cleared of glacial ice.
The Mississippi has many such oxbows, and some of the oxbows that have been created or cut off
during the time since those states were created have left pieces of those states on the “wrong” side of the
Mississippi. An international situation existed along the Rio Grande due to a shifting river course leaving
part of Mexico on the north bank of the river, but that’s another piece of history trivia. In the case at hand,
existing oxbows in the Mississippi’s course looped south and north of the east-west borderline arbitrarily
defined for the two states. Part of Fulton County, the westernmost county along Kentucky’s southern
border, wound up being properly east of the Mississippi and north of the defined border, but cut off from
the rest of the state.
That little enclave lies directly south of New Madrid, Missouri, which is much more famous for
being the early 19th Century epicenter of what is believed to have been the most powerful earthquake in
United State’s history (guess what - it was not on the Pacific rim!!). Fortunately, that area was not very
heavily settled; had it been, the damage and loss of life could have been tremendous.
Our little trivia question can be used in social studies classes to raise a little interest and perhaps
provide some bonus points; it worked for me when I taught the subject. But it can also lead to a discussion
of how arbitrary boundaries have affected history - too often tragically - in places like the Balkan
Peninsula, parts of tribal Africa, the Middle East, Ireland, and even the United States. It can also be used as
a piece of historical trivia because there were once two such places: Maine was broken off from
Massachusetts as part of the Compromise of 1820 and it was divided from the smaller, but more populous
portion of the state by a small piece of New Hampshire, which existed because the New Hampshire colony
desire its own access to the Atlantic.

Other articles in this series of unusual or interesting observations by the author:

ST - 1 The End of the Rainbow (Observing the end of a natural rainbow close at hand)
ST - 2 Which Way Are We Going? (A possible flight aid used by geese and other birds)
ST - 3 Down on the Farm…The Plastic Grows for Us (Use of renewable biochemicals from
agriculture)