You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the outer Aleutian Islands, stretching between Alaska and Russia, are home to the westernmost point of land in the United States and, in fact, in all of North America. But did you know that the Aleutians can also claim the easternmost point of North America as well? Wait, what? Allow me to introduce you to tiny, uninhabited Semisopochnoi Island, Alaska.

View Semisopochnoi Island in a larger map

Semisopochnoi is the island’s Russian name, meaning “having seven hills”—the Aleut natives called it “Unyax.” Its namesake seven hills are actually volcanic peaks, since the whole island is a collapsed volcano that last erupted in 1987. Because it remained free of the invasive Norway rats from passing ships that once thrived in the area (giving the archipelago its name, the Rat Islands) it’s an important nesting area for more than a million seabirds.

Most crucially for geography nerds, the easternmost point of Semisopochnoi Island sits less than ten miles west of the 180-degree meridian that separates the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern Hemisphere. In other words, Semisopochnoi and the dozen or so Aleutian islands lying beyond it are so far west that they’re actually east! Politically and even geologically, they’re part of North America, but by this strict geographic definition, they’re thousands of miles east of North America’s Atlantic coast.

“But wait a minute!” you object. “Enough of your cartographic mumbo-jumbo! Alaska is clearly not east relative to the rest of the continent.” That’s fair enough. You might argue that we should use the International Date Line (which zigzags to accommodate the Aleutians) and not the 180th meridian to define the boundaries between east and west. In that case, the easternmost point of North America is Nordustrundingen, in the northeast corner of Greenland—which is geologically part of the North American plate. Or, if you consider Greenland to be part of Europe, since it’s controlled by Denmark, then North America’s easternmost point is Cape Spear at the tip of Newfoundland. The easternmost point of the U.S. is Sail Rock, off West Quoddy Head, Maine.

But if we use the Prime Meridian and the 180th meridian to define the boundaries of the two hemispheres, then North America’s westernmost point (Amatignak Island in the Aleutians) and its easternmost point (good ol’ Semisopochnoi) are just 65 miles apart. I guess Kipling was wrong when he wrote that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

Photo: Stocktrek Images/Getty

Explore the world's oddities every week on CondeNastTraveler.com with Ken Jennings. Check out his latest book, Maphead__.