Mark Brader:
In each case we list *all* the countries that share a land border
(bridges do not count!) with a certain country, and you must name
that certain country.
3. Saudi Arabia.
Erland Sommarskog:
Qatar (I recall a discussion we had long ago, where we found maps where
Qatar was bordering to only Saudi-Arabia, only UAE and both. The
situation may have stabilised since then.)
It's come up in this newsgroup more than once: first in connection
with my Rare Entries contest MSB1 in 1996, where I ruled on the basis
that Qatar bordered the UAE, and then in connection with Dan Tilque's
Rotating Quiz 132 in 2014s, when Joshua Kreitzer kindly located my
1996 posting (which I no longer had a copy of) where I said:
|| If this had been pointed out to me during the protest period, I
|| would've allowed Qatar, to the benefit of Aidan Hollinshead and Mark
|| Huckabone.
||
|| It turns out that the border between Saudi Arabia (hereafter SA) and
|| the UAE is undemarcated, and different maps show at least three
|| versions of it.
||
|| The oldest maps I have, in atlases dated 1972 and 1980, show the UAE
|| as extending inland about 100 km from the coast along pretty much its
|| entire east-west extent. ,,, The 1980 atlas (Rand McNally New
|| International), in a map of scale 1:6,000,000, shows the SA-UAE border
|| reaching the coast at exactly the same point as the west end of the
|| Qatar border. In other words, in this version the *only* country that
|| Qatar appears to have a border with is the UAE, but (since the SA-UAE
|| border is a dashed line, indicating uncertainty) it is possible that
|| either Qatar at its southwest corner touches SA, or that the UAE again
|| touches the coast. ...
||
|| The atlas I used for the contest was the 1990 Rand McNally New Inter-
|| national. It shows the UAE as being wider in the east than the
|| earlier maps, extending over 150 km inland in places; but it is
|| narrower in the west, only about 25 km wide, and does not extend as
|| far west. On this map about 60% of Qatar's land border is with SA,
|| and 40% with the UAE. ...
||
|| However, [Dean Edmonds'] reference evidently shows a third version of
|| the border. Presumably it agrees with the one that Erland and I found
|| in the current online CIA World Factbook. This is almost the same as
|| the second version, but the western tip of the UAE is cut off at
|| longitude 51.6, the border extending straight north to the sea. The
|| CIA World Factbook identifies this line as the de facto boundary. I
|| take this to be the most current information, and therefore, as I
|| said, I would have accepted the answer. ...
and I then (in 2014) added:
| Thanks to Joshua Kreitzer for digging that up. I just have one thing
| to add, which is to note that the current CIAWF agrees with Google Maps
| as to the shape of the borders, and differs from all three of the
| layouts that I found mapped in 1996.
Now I find that these sources almost agree, but the CIAWF places the
east end of the Saudi-Qatar border a few miles north of what Google Maps
shows. In any case they agree that Qatar does not touch the UAE.
For what it's worth, Wikipedia's article on the Treaty of Jeddah (1974) discusses the borders in this area and who recognizes what. For trivia purposes I think we must accept that Qatar borders only Saudi Arabia.
--
Mark Brader "People with whole brains, however, dispute
Toronto this claim, and are generally more articulate
[email protected] in expressing their views." -- Gary Larson
My text in this article is in the public domain.
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