Tununak more remote than the Amazon

My good friend Christoph just sent me an article on a study done on the remoteness of regions in the world. The scientists studied how long it would take to travel by road, rail, or water from an area to the nearest city of 50,000 people. So if you live in a rural Minnesota it would be a calculation of drive time to that nearest city, let’s say Minneapolis. Things get interesting when either (1) you are very far away from a city of 50,000, or (2) you lack roads, or a combination of the two.
* picture taken from
According to this study a number of things jumped out at me. The first is that a vast majority (90%) of the world is no more than two days from a city of 50,000. That goes for the Amazon and the Sahara and every other part of the world (not including Antarctica). The next thing is that the most remote place on the planet, a spot on the Tibetan Plateau, is three weeks from a city of 50,000. Three weeks! The study says one day by car, the rest, all twenty of them, on foot. The last thing to stick out to me is that Tununak, where I live, is in that ten percent; we are more than two days travel to the nearest town of 50,000. That is crazy. We are more isolated than nearly all of Africa, including much of the Sahara. Than nearly all of the Amazon.

I haven’t really figured out what this all means. At the moment we are able to travel in and out Tununak of by plane. Really that is the only way. There are no roads linking us to any other town, not even Toksook Bay which is only six miles away. I am told that the true isolation, the true remoteness will kick in during the winter as snow and weather close our runway down for days on end. Last year they went nearly three weeks without a plane landing in Tununak. Food, mail, packages – everything stops, gets backed up in Bethel.

I don’t have a whole lot more on this topic at the moment, but I will follow up in a few weeks. I came to the realization today that I won’t be leaving Tununak until Christmas unless I travel chaperoning sports (which I may still get talked into). That would be about three months not leaving an area not much bigger than one square mile.

Read the article though – the graphics are amazing.
Where's the remotest place on Earth?