The second largest state, Texas; is it more or less than half the size of Alaska?

While the saying "everything's bigger in Texas" holds true for many things, it meets its match with the sheer scale of Alaska. The Lone Star State is indeed vast, but it is completely dwarfed by the Last Frontier. The difference is so immense that you could fit Texas inside of Alaska more than two times over and still have land left to spare.

Putting numbers to the comparison clarifies the relationship. Alaska sprawls across a staggering 665,000 square miles, a territory rich with massive mountain ranges, glaciers, and tundra. Texas, the second-largest state, covers an impressive but significantly smaller 268,000 square miles. This means that Texas is not just smaller than Alaska, but it is substantially less than half its size.

This massive difference can be difficult to visualize, partly because common flat maps of the U.S. often distort Alaska's true proportions. To offer another perspective, Alaska is larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined. Its immense and rugged wilderness truly places it in a geographical category of its own within the United States.