Easter Island, or Rapa Nui - Part One

Geographic facts about the most mysterious land

Where is Easter Island located on map?

Easter Island is a small territory of mere 160 km2. For you have a good idea you can imagine an area equivalent to the size of a square of side length 12 km (although the island really has a triangular form). It is located in the South Pacific Ocean 3600 km away from the coast of Chile and belongs to this country as part of its territory. In a very simplified map below, only for rapid geographical reference purposes, you can viewpoint it through the vast extension of the Pacific Ocean.

The most distant, isolated and solitary island in the world

Easter Island is a small territory of mere 160 km2. For you have a good idea you can imagine an area equivalent to the size of a square of side length 12 km (although the island really has a triangular form). It is located in the South Pacific Ocean 3600 km away from the coast of Chile and belongs to this country as part of its territory. In a very simplified map below, only for rapid geographical reference purposes, you can viewpoint it through the vast extension of the Pacific Ocean.

When we take into account the position on the planet's surface, area and population, approximately 150 sq km and around 5500 inhabitants in 2012, and its closest habitable territory, we conclude that this island is the most isolated place on the planet.

The most isolated place in the world

The measurements to prove it

As I drew a simplified line map to show this island from a view of several thousand kilometres high, I made it copying from Google Earth, of course, and the curvature of that vision does reduce, distort or vanish large areas in the picture. Now, in a new drawing below, I present the real distances in miles, where, for instance, we can conclude that the distances between Chile and Tahiti towards the Easter Island are quite similar (2300 miles in the first case and 2600 in the other) and it is just there, Chile and Tahiti, where there are enough people residing together that you can consider the nearest neighbors. In between these three places there are a tiny amount of isles or rocky islets, the majority of them are uninhabitable or near nothing populated as a case of the Pitcairn islands; these small areas are considered military outposts belonging to countries such as England, France or Chile. Well, the intention of these words is to explain that this island, aka Rapa Nui, is really the most isolated place on the planet.

The idea of "isolated" island, that here refers, is not able to be applied to archipelagos, as Hawaii for instance, where one tiny island always has a neighbouring inhabitable island. This characteristic of extreme isolation could had added to other factors to carry out the starvation and cannibalism in Easter Island in accordance to researches about this island that had suffered in the far past.