Research pinpoints town farthest away from ‘the city’
A team of researchers based at Oxford University has built the tools necessary to calculate how far any dot on a map is from a city — or anything else.
The research, published in Nature last month, allows us to pin down a question that has long evaded serious answers: Where is the middle of nowhere?
To know, you’d have to catalogue and calculate the navigation challenges presented by the planet’s complex, varied terrain and the dirt tracks, roads, railroads and waterways that crisscross it. You’d then need to string those calculations together, testing every possible path from every point to every other point.
That is pretty much what the folks did at the Malaria Atlas Project, a group at Oxford’s Big Data Institute that studies the intersection of disease, geography and demographics. The huge team — 22 authors are credited — spent years building a globe-spanning map outlining just how long it takes to cross any spot on the planet based on its transportation types, vegetation, slope, elevation and more. Those spots, or pixels, represent about a square kilometer.
Armed with this data, and hours and hours of computer time, The Washington Post processed every pixel and every populated place in the contiguous United States to find the one that best represents the “middle of nowhere.”
Congratulations, Glasgow, Montana! Of all towns with more than 1,000 residents, Glasgow, home to 3,363 people in the rolling prairie of northeastern Montana, is farthest — about 4.5 hours in any direction — from any metropolitan area of more than 75,000 people.
The Malaria Atlas Project’s research could shed light on global efforts to help the poor because access to cities, the researchers have found, is associated with such issues as health, education and environmental protection.
Understanding the landscape of geographic isolation in the United States doesn’t carry implications as big as the Malaria Atlas Project’s, but it still provides a deeper insight into a country that seems so defined by the cities and suburbs that all but about 2 percent of the population can reach in less than an hour.
Glasgow is in a region of northern Montana — running from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation to the west to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in the east — that consistently ranks as the most isolated, but still settled, part of the country.
To the north, a border crossing and acres upon acres of wheat and other grains lie between Glasgow and the nearest midsize Canadian city, Regina, in the province of Saskatchewan. To the south, both Glasgow and the waters of the Missouri River are pinned in by the Fort Peck Dam, an icon of an era when New Deal feats of civil engineering earned a place in the inaugural edition of Life magazine.
The seven-year boom fueled by the dam’s construction ended in 1940, and the town didn’t get its second wind until Glasgow Air Force Base opened in 1957. Before it closed in 1976, more people lived on the base than in the town itself, said Mark Dulaney, a longtime resident and a sales rep for a local office supply company.
Dulaney, 61, who moved to Glasgow from Iowa with his family in 1971, lives out by the reservoir and hunts pheasant and whatever game is in season. He said he enjoys the isolation in northeastern Montana, even if it means driving hours to sell printers and supplies across a sprawling sales territory or paying twice as much for wood pellets to heat his garage than he would in Billings, a metropolitan area of 164,496 people that’s about 4.5 hours away.
“It’s pretty slow moving here,” said Dulaney, who can travel all day on a hunting trip without seeing another car. “When we go to Billings, it seems like a big metropolis.”
Today, folks in Glasgow tend to work for the railroad, grow wheat, raise livestock or provide goods and services for people in those industries. Last summer brought the worst drought on record, Dulaney said, but there has been plenty of snow this winter, so 2018 is looking better.
“When the farmers and ranchers are happy, then everybody’s happy,” he said. The money they spend at restaurants and bars, and on farm equipment, buoys all of Glasgow.