Canada

Quick facts

How to spot Canada from satellite imagery

Canada is enormous. At 9.98 million square kilometres, it is the second-largest country on Earth by area, only slightly smaller than Russia and roughly the size of all of Europe with a Brazil thrown in for scale. Almost all of that area is forest, lake, tundra, or otherwise lightly inhabited — Canada's population of 40 million is clustered in a narrow strip within a few hundred kilometres of the US border, which means most satellite frames of Canada show something other than where most Canadians live.

That asymmetry is what makes Canada both easy and hard to identify in geography games. Easy, because the empty interior has a handful of unmistakable signatures. Hard, because the populated south can look a lot like the northern United States, and the prairies can look a lot like Montana or North Dakota. This guide walks through the cues that lock Canada in confidently.