ABSTRACT
Where are the world’s 6,000,000,000 people? Obviously, they reside, work, travel and play on 510,000,000 km2 of land, water and ice that comprise the Earth’s surface. At that spatial resolution, we can state their location unequivocally, though the count itself is clouded in uncertainty. Even the most geographically challenged observer will note, however, that most people live on land, not in the ocean. Suddenly, 361,637,000 km2 of sea surface is removed from the distribution, and population density jumps from 12 people per km2 to 40 people per km2. This simple, compelling act of removing the oceans from the total area is what cartographers call dasymetric interpolation.
