Countries With the Longest Coastlines in the World

Canada has the longest coastline of any country on Earth — by most estimates around 202,000 km, which is more than the next three countries put together and roughly five times the circumference of the planet. It is not close. The length comes from the Arctic Archipelago: tens of thousands of islands, each with its own crenellated shore, plus the deep inlets of the mainland north.

The top of the ranking

1. Canada — about 202,000 km. The Arctic islands do most of the work.
2. Norway — about 25,000 km of mainland, but well over 80,000 km once every fjord and skerry is traced. The fjords fold an enormous amount of shoreline into a small country.
3. Indonesia — about 54,700 km across some 17,000 islands, the longest coastline of any country that lies entirely in the tropics.
4. Russia — about 37,600 km, most of it Arctic and Pacific, much of it frozen for part of the year.
5. Philippines — about 36,300 km across more than 7,600 islands.
6. Japan — about 29,750 km, an unusually long coast for its land area.
7. Australia — about 25,760 km for the mainland and Tasmania, plus another 23,000 km of offshore-island shore.
8. United States — about 19,900 km, dominated by Alaska.
9. New Zealand — about 15,000 km, long for a country of its size.
10. China — about 14,500 km of mainland Pacific coast.

Greece has the longest coastline in the European Union — roughly 13,700 km across the mainland and around 6,000 islands — and the UK, Italy and the coasts of the wider Mediterranean and Caribbean fill out the next tier.

Why the numbers never agree: the coastline paradox

A coastline has no single true length. Measure Britain's coast with a 200 km ruler and you get one number; measure it with a 50 km ruler that follows more bays and headlands and you get a bigger number; measure around every rock and the figure keeps climbing. The finer the measuring stick, the longer the coast — without limit. This is the coastline paradox, first described by Lewis Fry Richardson and later folded into Benoît Mandelbrot's work on fractals. It is why the CIA World Factbook, the World Resources Institute and national mapping agencies can all publish different figures for the same country, sometimes by a factor of three or more.

The countries with no coastline at all

Forty-four countries are landlocked and have a coastline of zero. Two — Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan — are double-landlocked, meaning every neighbour is landlocked too, so you would have to cross at least two borders to reach the sea. At the other extreme, island nations like the Maldives, the Bahamas and the Marshall Islands have almost nothing but coastline relative to their land area.