Hawaii is one of America's most interesting and most well-known States.
It's the only one of America's 50 states to not be located at all in North America and the only one to be fully located within the tropics.
Millions of people vacation to the islands every single year and they remain a perennial bucket list destination for people all around the world. and the single most popular honeymoon destination for newlywed Americans to visit.
But the Hawaiian Islands also have a rather bizarre population pattern at first glance.
You see, as a young child growing up on the American Mainland, I was always under the mistaken assumption that Honolulu and most Hawaiians had to all be located on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Obviously, because it's the biggest of all the islands, to be fair to my younger self.
The Big Island or Hawaii Island does account for a significant majority of the greater Hawaiian Island's total land mass at about 63% of it, so assuming that's where most Hawaiians lived seemed like a reasonable conclusion at the time.
So imagine my absolute shock then when later on in life I learned that most people in Hawaii do not in fact live on the biggest island or even on the second biggest Island but rather on the third biggest island — Oahu.
You see, the modern 21st-century population of Hawaii is extremely heavily concentrated around the island of Oahu.
As of the most recent 2020 census, Hawaii's total state population was counted at around 1 million four hundred and fifty-five thousand residents, higher than 10 other US states including geographically large ones like Montana or South Dakota.
