Say you didn't really want to be around people, and you wanted to go to a country with a lot of open space. Where would you go? I have ten places (some countries and some territories controlled by countries) that have a small population density, which means there's a lot of space for not a lot of people. The way this is figured out is by taking the population of country then dividing it by the land area of the country (which is listed in square kilometers). And in case you need a refresher, a square kilometer is if you take a square and put in on land, and each end of this square is a kilometer long, that would be a square kilometer. And in case you need another refresher, a kilometer is 0.62 of a mile long, so if you converted these to miles, it would be an even smaller measurement.
10. Mauritania - density: 3.0 people/km2
9. Iceland - density: 3.0 people/ km2 (which is slightly less but rounds to the same)
8. Suriname - density: 2.7 people/km2
7. Australia - density: 2.6 people/km2
6. Namibia - density: 2.5 people/km2
5. French Guiana - density: 2.1 people/km2
4. Mongolia - density: 1.7 people/km2
3. Western Sahara (controlled by Morrocco) - density: 1.3 people/km2
2. Falkland Islands (controlled by United Kingdom) - 0.25 people/km2
1. Greenland (controlled by Denmark) - 0.026/km2
In case you're wondering why Antarctica isn't on this list, it's simple: it isn't a country, and no one claims it as their territory. It would certainly be Number 1 if it was on this list though.
Some of the areas listed above are large areas of land: Greenland, Mongolia, Australia, etc. Oddly enough, if you look at the countries (or territories) that are the most densely populated, they usually small places. For example: Bangladesh (which is only 147,000km2) has a slightly higher population than Russia (which is 17,000,000 km2 and the largest country by land area in the world), which makes Bangladesh's density 1100 people/km2 and Russia's density 8.3 people/km2. And then there's countries like China and India, numbers 1 and 2 in population in the world (China having 1.3 billion, and India having 1.2 billion). China's population density is 140 people/km2 and India's population density is 365 people/km2.
And since we live in the US, I'm sure you're curious where we rank. The 2011 estimate listed the US as having over 312,000,000 people, which puts us 3rd in the world. Land area is 9,826,000 km2, which puts us 3rd if you include territories and 4th if you don't (depending on which source you look at). So our population density is 33.7 people/km2.
Bet you didn't know that!
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