Ukraine struck Russia’s largest oil refinery, located in the city of Omsk, on Monday, marking what its forces say was its furthest-ever drone attack in the war.
The Omsk facility, which processes about 21 million tons of oil a year, is in Western Siberia and about 1,700 miles from Ukrainian territory — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Houston.
TIL Siberia is way bigger than I expected. I knew it was big, but it looks like it’s more than half of Russian landmass. It can’t all be the climate I’m picturing, right? Like it borders Kazakhstan, so I figure at least part of it has to have hot summers
most of it is icy forest where it’s too cold to do agriculture (in the north). there’s a thin latitude where the weather is good for agriculture. south of that it’s not the heat but the drought that’s the problem. up north you have shortage of sunlight, south you have shortage of water. that’s why the fertile area is narrow.
The train that crosses Siberia takes 4 days to cross it, running 24 hours a day (with 30 min stops once or twice a day).
Siberia is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Siberia.
Still fits at least twice into Texas! /s
That is for the infinite universe, not for finite Siberia. However, the largeness of Siberia is much better at demonstrating the concept of infinite than an actually infinite land mass.
Well, damn. You need to find a closer chemist.
For reference:
https://truesize.net/en/
Though is that comparison corrected for the projection? Texas is farther south than Siberia and with the usual projection used, you can only compare the sizes of things at the same latitude. It’s the same thing that makes Greenland look as big as Africa when it’s closer to the size of South Africa.
Yes. Check it out here: https://truesize.net/en/
lol, you got me, that’s what twigged it for me- I figured Siberia would start further east of Ukraine than Texas is of California
Siberia is actually 3/4ths of Russia’s landmass. The northern parts are taiga, which are giant uninterrupted forests. The shores of the Arctic Ocean are mostly tundra. In the southern parts the taiga gives way to steppes.
In the northern parts the climate has warm but quite short summers and long cold winters. In the southern part, where most of the population lives, they have the same climate as southern Canada/New England just less humid. The Western parts are also covered by warm winds that originate from the Middle East and hence have higher temperatures than their more Eastern areas. For reference in Novosibirsk, which is the largest city the average yearly summer temperatures reach 25 degrees Celsius but temperatures can also spike to as high as 38 degrees.
So yeah Siberia is not all some barren tundra as most people imagine.
https://youtu.be/QDmWYVdN8ug
This is the comment I came looking for. Thank you, Dr. Bob.