Half the World Lives Inside This Circle

Half of all the people on Earth live inside one circle over South and East Asia, about 4 billion people on about 7 percent of the planet's surface. We measured it ourselves on the newest population map, then stacked the layers that explain it: the rivers and deltas, the summer monsoon, the rice fields, and the high, empty Tibetan Plateau in the middle. Chapters 0:00 Half the world in one circle 0:27 Measuring the circle 1:43 Follow the water 3:04 The summer rain 3:51 Rice 4:43 The empty middle 5:43 Why here How we measured The circle is our own calculation on WorldPop's 2025 population grid (R2025A, UN-adjusted, 1 km): the smallest circle on the globe that holds half of everyone. Its centre is in eastern Myanmar (100.35 E, 20.9 N) and its radius is about 3,440 km. The idea was first posted on Reddit by the user valeriepieris in 2013; Danny Quah (2015) and Arthur (2023) made earlier measurements, with radii of about 3,300 and 3,390 km. The shares on screen (rice fields, people below 200 m, land above 3,000 m, Japanese living outside the line) are our calculations from WorldPop, MIRCA2000 rice harvested areas (around the year 2000) and NOAA ETOPO 2022 elevation. Sources WorldPop (2025), Global 2015-2030 R2025A population, 1 km, constrained, UN-adjusted (CC BY 4.0) Quah, D. (2015), The world's tightest cluster of people, LSE Arthur, R. (2023), Valeriepieris Circles for Spatial Data Analysis, Geographical Analysis 56(3) UN DESA, World Population Prospects 2024 Portmann, Siebert and Döll (2010), MIRCA2000, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 24 (data CC BY 4.0) FAOSTAT (2024) rice production; UN News (2003), International Year of Rice Stevens, Zhuang and Fuller (2024), Evolutionary Human Sciences; Zuo et al. (2017), PNAS 114(25) India Meteorological Department (2022), Updated rainfall normals 1971-2020 European Space Agency (2020), Ganges Delta; World Bank World Development Indicators NASA (2018), Lights of Java; BPS-Statistics Indonesia (2020 census) National Bureau of Statistics of China (2021), Seventh National Population Census Zhang, Li and Zheng (2014), Boundary and area of the Tibetan Plateau; Yao et al. (2012), Third Pole Environment Immerzeel, van Beek and Bierkens (2010), Climate Change Will Affect the Asian Water Towers, Science 328 Li and Yao (2023), PeerJ 11 (Taklimakan rainfall); NASA Earth Observatory (2008), Tibet Our World in Data, Population by world region (HYDE 2023, Gapminder, UN WPP 2024) Maps and data WorldPop 2025 (CC BY 4.0) · MIRCA2000 rice, Portmann et al. 2010 (CC BY 4.0) · NASA Blue Marble Next Generation (public domain) · NOAA ETOPO 2022 (public domain) · CHIRPS v2.0 rainfall, UC Santa Barbara Climate Hazards Center (public domain) · Natural Earth (public domain) · NASA imagery · photographs credited on screen (Pexels) #geography #maps #asia