New Arctic population map published in Russia

This map of the various populations in the Arctic, entitled “The Arctic: Life Beyond the Arctic Circle,” comes from RIA Novosti’s Infographics website. Each orange circle tells the relative strength of the local population, followed by its amount. For instance, in Alaska, there are “649 тыс. человек,” meaning 649,000 people. However, what the map doesn’t show is that almost half of Alaskans live well below the Arctic Circle, in Anchorage. In contrast, they use a circle to represent the city of Murmansk, the largest metropolitan area in the Arctic. Cities seem to be conflated with regions in this map, making it somewhat problematic. However, it does clearly show that Russia has a large population advantage in the Arctic. The bar in the middle represents, from left to right, the relative size of the Russian, European, and American Arctic populations.

From this, we can see that Canada really doesn’t have much of an Arctic population at all – one of the reasons why it encouraged, and some say forced, indigenous people to move into permanent Arctic settlements in the 1950s and 1960s. In total, the Arctic has 4.238 million people. The legend reveals that the white areas represent tundra and forest tundra, while the blue areas represent the rest of the country’s territory. Red lines are state borders, while the black dotted line is the Arctic circle.