Knowledge Base
Places, boundaries, distances, and surprising details about the shape of our world.
Straddling the icy waters of the Bering Strait, Little Diomede Island belonging to the United States and Big Diomede Island belonging to Russia sit just 2.4 miles apart. However, because the International Date Line bisects the channel between them, Big Diomede is twenty-one hours ahead of Little Diomede. Local residents can gaze across a narrow frozen strait from Alaska and literally watch tomorrow unfolding in Siberia.
Geographers universally recognize Alaska as the northernmost and westernmost state in the United States. Surprisingly, Alaska also claims the title of the easternmost state in the Union. Semisopochnoi Island, situated in the western Aleutian archipelago, crosses the 180th meridian of longitude into the Eastern Hemisphere. Because geographic coordinates define east from Greenwich, this volcanic island technically places American soil at the far eastern edge of planetary maps.
While Mount Everest reaches the highest altitude above mean sea level at 29,032 feet, Hawaiian dormant volcano Mauna Kea is planetary Earth’s tallest mountain from base to peak. Originating from a subterranean ocean floor depression roughly 19,700 feet below sea level, Mauna Kea’s volcanic cone rises to a summit elevation of 13,803 feet. Measured from base to summit, the colossal shield volcano spans over 33,500 total feet.
Because the centrifugal rotational force of Earth causes a pronounced equatorial bulge around its midriff, the planet is an oblate spheroid rather than a uniform sphere. Consequently, the snowcapped peak of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador—standing only one degree south of the equator—protrudes 6,800 feet farther from the planetary core than Mount Everest. Chimborazo’s high volcanic summit represents the absolute physical point on Earth closest to outer space.
Covering more than 63 million square miles (165 million square kilometers), the vast Pacific Ocean is the defining geographic titan of our world. Its watery surface area exceeds the combined landmass of every continent, island, and sovereign country on Earth with plenty of room to spare. Stretching from the Antarctic ice shelf to the Arctic Circle, the Pacific contains over half of the planet’s free water.
Located in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, the Sargasso Sea is the only sea on Earth that possesses zero terrestrial continental coastlines. Instead of being bound by land, its geographic perimeter is defined entirely by four swirling ocean currents forming the North Atlantic Gyre. Named for the dense mats of free-floating brown Sargassum seaweed blanketing its surface, it provides a crucial oceanic nursery for endangered European eels.
Spanning massive wilderness basins carved by retreating glaciers during the last ice age, Canada contains an estimated sixty-two percent of all global natural freshwater lakes larger than 0.1 square kilometers. More than nine percent of Canada’s entire national land area is covered by liquid freshwater, containing nearly nine hundred thousand mapped lakes. The Canadian Shield preserves a staggering reservoir of global aquatic ecosystems vital to planetary weather.
Known formally as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, Point Nemo represents the single most remote location on planet Earth. Situated in the South Pacific Ocean over 2,688 kilometers (1,670 miles) from the nearest rocky shores of Ducie Island, Motu Nui, and Maher Island, human astronauts aboard the International Space Station orbiting 400 kilometers overhead are routinely closer to Point Nemo than any other human beings on the planet.
Spanning more than thirty million square kilometers, Africa is the only continent on Earth that straddles all four geographic hemispheres: Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. The Prime Meridian passes through western Africa near Ghana and Algeria, while the Equator cuts directly across the continent’s central rainforests and great lakes. This central planetary positioning blesses Africa with exceptionally symmetrical climatic zones extending outward north and south from the tropical Equator.
Spanning more than seventeen million square kilometers across northern Eurasia, the Russian Federation encompasses eleven distinct contiguous time zones within a single sovereign nation. When residents in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea coast are eating breakfast, citizens in the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean are already preparing for sleep. This staggering east-west geographic breadth stretches across nine thousand kilometers, making domestic train journeys week-long transcontinental expeditions.
Located along the Syrian-African rift valley between Jordan and Israel, the hypersaline waters of the Dead Sea mark the lowest land elevation on Earth, resting 1,410 feet below sea level. With salinity exceeding thirty-four percent—nearly ten times saltier than the ocean—the dense mineral-rich water prevents all macroscopic marine life from surviving while creating immense natural buoyancy that allows human swimmers to float effortlessly upon the surface.
Located in the mountainous wilderness of southern Siberia, Lake Baikal is both the oldest and deepest freshwater lake on Earth, holding an astonishing twenty percent of global unfrozen surface fresh water. Plunging to a maximum depth of 1,642 meters (5,387 feet) and containing over twenty-three thousand cubic kilometers of crystal-clear water, Baikal contains more water than all five North American Great Lakes combined, hosting thousands of endemic species.
Covering more than two point one million square kilometers between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, Greenland is Earth’s largest non-continental island. Although traditional Mercator map projections stretch its polar landmass to appear comparable in size to Africa, Africa is actually fourteen times larger in true surface area. Over eighty percent of Greenland remains buried beneath a glacial ice sheet.
Located in the western Pacific Ocean east of the Mariana Islands, the Challenger Deep within the Mariana Trench plunges nearly eleven thousand meters (thirty-six thousand feet) beneath sea level. Formed where the dense Pacific tectonic plate subducts beneath the smaller Mariana plate, the trench’s floor could submerge Mount Everest completely and still leave over two kilometers of ocean water above.
Founded in antiquity as Byzantium and later renowned as Constantinople, Istanbul is the world’s only major metropolis straddling two continents. The nineteen-mile-long Bosphorus Strait links the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara while dividing Istanbul’s European districts in Thrace from its Asian neighborhoods in Anatolia, making the waterway one of history’s most strategic maritime crossroads.