Geography: 20 Astonishing Facts and World Records

Everest rises to 29,032 feet (8,849 meters). The Mariana Trench plunges to 36,070 feet (10,994 meters). The Nile runs 4,130 miles (6,650 kilometers). You have probably bumped into those figures before. The real surprise starts elsewhere: in a Chilean desert drier than the surface of Mars, in a South African mine where geothermal heat forces miners into chilled suits, on a Philippine island that sits inside a lake that sits inside an island that sits inside a lake that sits inside an island.

Geography is full of paradoxes, anomalies and unlikely configurations that nature or human borders have produced. Here are twenty facts chosen for their strangeness, their documentary precision and their ability to change the way you look at a world map.

Records of climate and relief

1. The Atacama, drier than Mars

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the most arid place on Earth. Some weather stations in the area, particularly near the town of Arica, have recorded no rainfall at all for more than fourteen consecutive years. Humidity drops below 1% in places, which is why NASA and the ESA use the region as a testing ground for Mars missions: organic matter is so scarce there that instruments designed to detect life on Mars can be calibrated without false positives.

2. Angel Falls, a vertical drop into the void

Angel Falls in Venezuela, inside Canaima National Park, is the world's tallest waterfall at 3,212 feet (979 meters), with an uninterrupted free fall of 2,648 feet (807 meters). The American aviator Jimmie Angel spotted it from his plane in 1933. The water plunges off the top of Auyán-Tepuy, one of the gigantic tabletop mountains characteristic of the region.

3. Death Valley and its 134 °F

On July 10, 1913, Furnace Creek Ranch in California recorded 134 °F (56.7 °C): the highest temperature ever measured at the Earth's surface, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Death Valley is a sunken basin between mountain ranges that trap hot air, and parts of it lie 282 feet (86 meters) below sea level.

4. Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited village

At the other extreme, the village of Oymyakon in Yakutia, Russia, holds the record for the lowest temperature ever measured at a permanently inhabited site: -90 °F (-67.7 °C), recorded in February 1933. About 500 people live there year-round. School stays open until -62 °F. Cars run continuously to keep them from freezing solid.

Topographic Curiosities

5. An island in a lake in an island in a lake in an island

On the island of Luzon in the Philippines, Lake Taal contains a volcanic island named Volcano Island. At the summit of its crater sits a small lake, Main Crater Lake, which itself contains a tiny island called Vulcan Point. A small rock sticking out of a puddle on Vulcan Point has occasionally been claimed as a fifth level of nesting. It is the most famous example of geographic recursion in the world.

6. The longest border in the world

The border between the United States and Canada stretches 5,525 miles (8,891 kilometers), including 1,538 miles (2,475 kilometers) between Alaska and the Yukon. That makes it the longest international land border on Earth. It is also the longest demilitarized border anywhere.

7. An enclave in an enclave in an enclave

Until 2015, the border between India and Bangladesh contained more than 200 enclaves, including a configuration unique in the world: Dahala Khagrabari, a 7,000-square-meter Indian mustard field, sat inside a Bangladeshi enclave (Upanchowki Bhajni), which sat inside an Indian enclave (Balapara Khagrabari), which sat inside Bangladesh. A 2015 land-swap agreement put an end to that anomaly.

8. The deepest habitable point beneath the surface

The Mponeng gold mine in South Africa descends about 13,100 feet (4,000 meters) below ground. The rock temperature reaches 151 °F (66 °C), and mining companies pump hundreds of tons of crushed ice into the shafts every day to cool the air. Around 4,000 miners go down daily, working at depths greater than most military submarines ever reach.

Countries with surprising quirks

9. Saudi Arabia, a country with no permanent rivers

Saudi Arabia, at 830,000 square miles (2.15 million km²), is one of the largest countries on Earth with no permanent river or stream. Only wadis (dry beds that fill briefly after rare heavy rains) cross its territory. The country depends massively on desalination: it produces around 20% of the world's desalinated water.

10. Landlocked countries

Forty-four countries have no direct access to the sea. Two of them are doubly landlocked, meaning they are surrounded only by other landlocked countries: Liechtenstein (between Switzerland and Austria) and Uzbekistan (encircled by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan).

11. Vatican City, a country of 0.19 sq mi

Vatican City is the smallest internationally recognized sovereign state, with 0.49 km² (0.19 sq mi) and about 800 residents. It still maintains its own army (the Swiss Guard, founded in 1506 by Pope Julius II), its own currency, its own postage stamps and a 300-meter rail line connecting its station to the Italian network.

12. France, a country across twelve time zones

With its overseas departments and territories spread across every ocean, metropolitan and overseas France together cover twelve different time zones: the world record for any single country. When it is noon in Paris, it is 2 a.m. in Tahiti and 2 p.m. on Réunion Island.

Rivers, lakes and seas

13. The Amazon and its colossal flow

The Amazon, while not the longest river in the world, is by far the most powerful. Its average discharge at the mouth reaches 209,000 cubic meters per second, or roughly 20% of all the freshwater that returns to the oceans every second. Its basin drains a territory of 2.7 million square miles (7 million km²), roughly twice the size of India.

14. The Caspian Sea, the largest salt lake on Earth

Despite its name, the Caspian Sea is technically a lake. At 143,000 square miles (371,000 km²), it is five times the combined area of the North American Great Lakes. Its legal status was disputed for decades between the five bordering countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaijan), because the division of oil and fishing rights depends on whether it counts as a sea or a lake.

15. Lake Baikal, the deepest and most voluminous

Lake Baikal in Siberia reaches a depth of 5,387 feet (1,642 meters). It holds about 23% of all unfrozen freshwater on the planet's surface: more than the five North American Great Lakes combined. Its endemic biodiversity includes the nerpa, the only seal species that lives exclusively in freshwater.

16. The Dead Sea, 1,410 feet below sea level

The surface of the Dead Sea sits about 1,410 feet (430 meters) below sea level, making it the lowest exposed point on Earth. Its salinity reaches 34.2%, nearly ten times that of the open ocean, which is why floating in it requires no effort. The Dead Sea has been shrinking by about a meter a year since the 1960s, drained by water extraction along the Jordan River.

Extreme human constructions

17. The Pan-American Highway and its missing piece

The Pan-American Highway runs from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Ushuaia in Argentina, covering close to 18,640 miles (30,000 kilometers). It is almost continuous, except for about 60 miles (100 kilometers) of impassable jungle between Panama and Colombia: the Darién Gap. The zone remains one of the most dangerous in the Americas. Migrants who cross it on foot face venomous snakes, jaguars and armed groups.

18. Mount Athos, a monastic republic

The Mount Athos peninsula in northern Greece has been an autonomous monastic republic since the year 972. Twenty Orthodox monasteries house around 2,000 monks. No woman, and no female domestic animal (with a handful of exceptions like cats kept to chase mice), is allowed onto the territory: a rule known as the abaton, more than a thousand years old.

19. The Gotthard Base Tunnel

The world's longest railway tunnel is Swiss: the Gotthard Base Tunnel, opened in 2016, runs 35.5 miles (57.1 kilometers) under the Alps. Construction took seventeen years and €12 billion, and required boring 152 kilometers of galleries in total when counting access tunnels. Temperatures inside the tunnel can reach 115 °F (46 °C) because of rock pressure.

20. The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge

The Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge in China is the longest bridge in the world at 102.4 miles (164.8 kilometers). It is part of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line. Building it took 10,000 workers four years and it opened in 2011. Its total length is greater than the distance from New York City to Philadelphia by road.

A few political oddities to close

Political geography also has its surprises. Russia is the only country that directly borders both North Korea and Norway. The border between Sudan and Egypt is unique because of Bir Tawil: a 795-square-mile (2,060 km²) zone that neither country actually claims. It is one of the rare terrae nullius of the habitable world.

Kiribati, a republic in the Pacific, is the only country on Earth that lies in all four hemispheres: northern, southern, eastern and western at once. Bhutan, meanwhile, was the last country in the world to introduce television and the internet: both arrived together in 1999.

Going Further

Geography is more than maps and borders. It is a window into the physical, climatic, historical and political constraints that have shaped human societies. Every record listed here hides centuries of exploration, cartography, conflict or engineering effort.

If world geography fascinates you, you can test your knowledge with our geography quizzes on SparkleQuiz and challenge your friends on improbable capitals, forgotten rivers and countries you may never have heard of.

Put your knowledge to the test

Twenty records is a lot to hold in memory: driest desert, deepest mine, longest bridge. The fun part is finding out which ones actually stuck. These quizzes pick up exactly where this list leaves off:

• Geography: World Extremes: highest, deepest, hottest, coldest: the records themselves
• Travel Curiosities and Extreme Geographic Records: the oddities, enclaves and anomalies of the map
• World Records and Superlatives: beyond geography, everything that holds a record
• Great Lakes of the World: Baikal, the Caspian and their fellow giants
• Deserts and Polar Regions: from the Atacama to Oymyakon