Population Density Thread On Twitter Goes Viral. Elon Musk Reacts

A Twitter thread explaining population density across the world with the help of data visualisation is gaining traction among the users. Posted by Twitter user Tim Urban, it shows which parts of the planet have the highest concentration of population and where it is sparsely populated. The thread is based on the analysis done by Alasdair Rae, a researcher and data analysis expert. According to Mr Rae, the analysis is based on Global Human Settlement data of the European Union which is freely available.

The data shows spread of the population across the continents. In the United States, the East and Southeast is densely populated than the rest of the country. New Jersey has the highest population density in the US, while Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota have the lowest spread of the population.

In case of India, the Indo-Gangetic plain is one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, the population density data further shows. The bars representing the number of people living in one square kilometres are placed extremely close to each other in this part, while the extreme North is sparsely populated.

The thread further shows that Southeast Asia has the most densely populated cities, the prominent among them being Indonesian capital Jakarta which is on track to topple Tokyo as the world's most populous city by 2030. It further said that with a population of 143 million, Java is the most populous island on Earth.

India's neighbour Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet, according to the Twitter thread and in China, almost all the people are in the Southeast.

Europe and Australia are the least dense continents, with one of the tweets in the thread showing very few bar graphs in Iceland.

The post led to a huge discussion on Twitter, in which billionaire Elon Musk also participated. "Earth is basically empty of humans," he said while responding to the now viral thread.

"Humans are consuming natural resources far faster than Earth can replenish. Species are going extinct 1000x faster than the natural background rate," said environmentalist Leilani Munter.

The number crunching on which this Twitter thread is based on, was originally done by Mr Rae in 2020. He had explained that the maps use 1km x 1km data and the height of the bars represents the number of people living in any one square.