Which country really has the longest coastline?
Canada's coast is longer than the next three countries combined — and the honest answer to "how long is it?" is that it depends on your ruler.
Canada has 202,080 kilometres of coastline. That is not a rounding of a big number — it is longer than the coastlines of Indonesia, Russia and the Philippines put together, and those three sit second, third and fourth on the list. If you flattened Canada's coast into a straight line it would wrap around the equator five times.
Almost nobody guesses this on the first try. People reach for Australia, or Brazil, or some vast tropical archipelago, because those are the coasts we see in photographs. Canada's coast is mostly Arctic, mostly uninhabited, and almost entirely made of islands nobody can name.
The Arctic archipelago does the work
Canada's mainland coast is long but unremarkable. What inflates the number is the Arctic Archipelago: roughly 36,500 islands scattered north of the mainland, including Baffin Island, Victoria Island and Ellesmere Island — each one large enough to be a serious country on its own. Baffin Island alone is bigger than Spain.
Every one of those islands has a shoreline, and every shoreline counts. The same effect explains the rest of the top five. Indonesia's 54,716 km comes from some 17,000 islands. The Philippines' 36,289 km comes from about 7,600. Japan, in eighth place by land area among these, ranks fifth by coast because it is a chain, not a block.
Why the number depends on the ruler
Coastline length is the most slippery statistic in geography. Measure Britain's coast with a 100-kilometre ruler and you get one answer; measure it with a 1-kilometre ruler and you get a much bigger one, because the shorter ruler follows every bay and headland the longer one skipped. Shrink the ruler again and the number grows again. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot used exactly this problem to introduce fractals, and it is now known as the coastline paradox.
This is why published figures for the same country differ wildly between sources. The numbers in this game come from the CIA World Factbook, which applies one consistent methodology to every country — the only way a comparison like this means anything. Treat them as a fair ranking rather than a physical truth.
The full top eight
Coastline length in kilometres, as used in the game:
- Canada — 202,080 km
- Indonesia — 54,716 km
- Russia — 37,653 km
- Philippines — 36,289 km
- Japan — 29,751 km
- Australia — 25,760 km
- Norway — 25,148 km
- United States — 19,924 km
Norway punches far above its size
Norway is the most impressive entry on that list. It is a small country by area — smaller than Japan, a fraction of Australia — yet it sits seventh, because a fjord is a coastline folded back on itself over and over. The water reaches a hundred kilometres inland and every metre of that intrusion is coast.
Australia is the opposite case. It is the sixth-largest country on Earth by land area but its coast is comparatively smooth: long beaches and gentle bays, with few deep inlets and relatively little in the way of offshore islands. Size and coastline are related, but far more loosely than people expect.
The countries with no coast at all
Forty-four countries are landlocked and score exactly zero. Some are obvious — Switzerland, Mongolia, Paraguay. Others surprise people: South Sudan, which only became a country in 2011, has no sea access at all, and neither do Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein or Vatican City.
Two of them are landlocked twice over. Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan are surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries, so you have to cross two international borders to reach salt water from either. Bolivia is the sorest case: it lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific in the 1880s and still maintains a navy, which patrols Lake Titicaca and the rivers, and still marks a national Day of the Sea every March.
How to guess well
Three rules will carry you a long way in this category. First, count islands, not land: an archipelago beats a continent nearly every time. Second, look for fjords and deep indentation — Norway, Chile and Greece all outrank countries several times their size. Third, remember that a big, blocky country with a smooth shore (Brazil, Australia, much of Africa) will score lower than its size suggests.
And when you draw a landlocked country, you already know the answer: zero is lower than everything except another zero.