CGP Grey
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2016–2020
4:42 · 37M views · Jun 5, 2013
CGP Grey walks through the odd history and quirks of the US-Canada border, including how it was surveyed and its irregularities such as exclaves.
HN recommends it as an entertaining overview in any thread about border oddities.
5 comments from Hacker News
There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border. this video Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs. Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.
There is a great youtube video on this and similar can-US border irregularities. Search for "Canada-US no touching zone". There is another exclave near vancouver. this video
There's a great CGP Grey video on the Canada-US border well worth watching if this interests you: this video
this video The border is defined as a straight line, but was surveyed as a series of slightly wobbly series of lines. They put up thousands of stone pillars, cut out a strip of trees along the border, and it became official. IIRC there's also some stuff about a disputed island
There was much silliness with the boarder. They actually drew some of it using blank maps. this video (And that map missed a huge part of the can-us boarder, focusing only on the southern one.)