Geography
The airport is 25 miles (40 km) driving distance from downtown Denver, which is 19 miles (31 km) further away than Stapleton International Airport, the airport it replaced. The distant location was chosen to avoid aircraft noise affecting developed areas, to accommodate a generous runway layout that would not be compromised by winter storms, and to allow for future expansion. The 33,457 acres (52.277 sq mi; 135.40 km2) of land occupied by the airport is nearly twice the land area of Manhattan. The land was transferred from Adams County to Denver after a 1989 vote, increasing the city's size by 50 percent. However, much of the city of Aurora is actually closer to the airport than the developed portions of Denver, and all freeway traffic accessing the airport from central Denver passes through Aurora.
Airport officials say its large area contributes to it having the highest number of wildlife strikes in the United States (2,090 this decade – although it ranked seventh on basis of takeoffs and landings).
Read more about this topic: Denver International Airport
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)