The countries with the lowest elevation, measured by their lowest point on land, are Jordan, Israel and Palestine, which share the shore of the Dead Sea at about 440 metres (1,443 ft) below sea level according to Wikipedia's List of countries by lowest point, using the 2025 lake level of −439.78 m. After those three come Syria's claimed low point on the Sea of Galilee (−214 m), Djibouti's Lake Assal (−155 m) and China's Aydingkol in the Turpan Depression (−154 m). Almost every top-ten low point has one of two causes: a tectonic rift pulling the crust apart, or a closed desert basin, hollowed by erosion or dissolving rock, where evaporation beats rainfall, so no river or sea refills it.
The ranking below counts down from tenth place to first. It ranks each country by the single lowest natural point of dry land inside it, not by average elevation and not by how much of its territory lies below sea level. Lake surfaces count because their shores are dry land at that height; mines and tunnels do not.
| Rank | Country | Lowest point | Elevation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1= | Jordan | Dead Sea shore | −440 m (−1,443 ft) |
| 1= | Israel | Dead Sea shore | −440 m (−1,443 ft) |
| 1= | Palestine (West Bank) | Dead Sea shore | −440 m (−1,443 ft) |
| 4 | Syria (claimed, Golan Heights) | Sea of Galilee north-east shore | −214 m (−702 ft) |
| 5 | Djibouti | Lake Assal | −155 m (−509 ft) |
| 6 | China | Aydingkol, Turpan Depression | −154 m (−505 ft) |
| 7 | Kazakhstan | Karagiye Depression | −134 m (−440 ft) |
| 8 | Egypt | Qattara Depression | −133 m (−436 ft) |
| 9 | Ethiopia | Danakil Depression | −125 m (−410 ft) |
| 10 | Argentina | Laguna del Carbón | −105 m (−344 ft) |
Nos. 10 to 8: Patagonia, the Danakil and the Qattara Depression
10. Argentina, −105 m. Laguna del Carbón, a salt lake in Santa Cruz Province, sits 54 km from the port of Puerto San Julián inside the Gran Bajo de San Julián, a closed basin between San Julián Bay and the Chico River. At 105 m (344 ft) below sea level it is the lowest point in the Americas and, by Wikipedia's count, the seventh-lowest point on Earth. It is regularly overlooked in favour of Death Valley, yet it lies about 19 m deeper. Like the other desert hollows on this list it is endorheic: no river drains out of the basin, so whatever water reaches it stays until it evaporates.
9. Ethiopia, −125 m. The Danakil Depression is a valley of roughly 200 by 50 km across the north of the Afar Region, walled in by the Ethiopian Plateau to the west and the Danakil Alps to the east, beyond which lies the Red Sea. It is a true rift. The Nubian plate and the small Danakil microplate are pulling apart at about 18 mm a year in the south of the depression and 8 mm in the north, and the thinning crust has let magma through to build the Erta Ale volcanic range. The settlement of Dallol, about 130 m below sea level, recorded an average annual temperature of 34.6 °C between 1960 and 1966, the highest average for any inhabited place on record.
8. Egypt, −133 m. Egypt's great hollow fills about 19,605 km² (7,570 sq mi) of Matruh Governorate, roughly the size of Lake Ontario. Its lowest point, 133 m (436 ft) below sea level, is the second lowest in Africa. No fault opened it. Salt crystallising in the floor broke the rock apart and the wind carried the debris away, a combination of salt weathering and wind erosion that keeps working today. Escarpments up to 280 m high mark its northern edge.
Because the Mediterranean is so close, engineers have long proposed letting the sea in. The Qattara Depression Project would have cut a canal or tunnel of 55 to 100 km from the coast, letting seawater pour into the basin and drive turbines while the desert sun evaporated it at the far end. The scheme was compared in scale to the Aswan High Dam but was never built, and in May 2026 Egypt formally abandoned it as economically unviable, citing the risk of salting the groundwater and damaging the desert's ecosystems.
Nos. 7 and 6: Karagiye and the Turpan Depression
7. Kazakhstan, −134 m. Karagiye, whose Kazakh name means "black jaw", is a 40 km karst trench on the Mangyshlak Peninsula close to the Caspian Sea. At its lowest point, Vpadina Kaundy, it reaches about 134 m (440 ft) below sea level, the lowest point in Central Asia and in the whole of the former Soviet Union. Limestone, dolomite and gypsum dissolved underground, leaving caves and sinkholes that eventually collapsed into one long trough. The Caspian's own surface is about 27 m below sea level, so the whole region starts low.
6. China, −154 m. Aydingkol, or Aiding Lake, lies in the Turpan Depression in Xinjiang, about 35 km from the city of Turpan; the depression itself sits about 150 km south-east of the regional capital Ürümqi. Its Uyghur name means "moon lake", after the white salt that once shone around its edge. Geologically, the depression is a trough bounded by faults within the eastern Tian Shan. The lake itself is now almost completely dry: irrigation shrank it to about 22 km² by 1958, and by 2000 it had largely turned into a salt pan. The basin is also China's hottest place. A station at Sanbu township in Turpan reached 52.2 °C on 16 July 2023, the national record.
No. 5: Lake Assal and the Afar Rift in Djibouti
5. Djibouti, −155 m. Lake Assal, about 120 km west of Djibouti city at the western end of the Gulf of Tadjoura, is the lowest point in Africa at 155 m (509 ft) below sea level. It sits in the Afar Triangle, a depression created by the Afar triple junction, part of the Great Rift Valley, where the crust is being pulled apart in three directions. The lake has no outflow, and evaporation in the heat has made it about ten times saltier than the sea. It is oval, roughly 19 km long and 6.5 km wide, and split between a crust of crystallised salt covering 68 km² and 54 km² of brine.
Salt is the local industry. Concessions to work it were awarded in 2002 at the south-eastern end of the lake, and Djibouti's National Environmental Action Plan of 2000 made the lake a protected zone, though the law never fixed the zone's boundaries.
No. 4: Syria's Claim on the Sea of Galilee Shore
4. Syria (claimed), −214 m. This is the one entry that depends on a disputed border. The list records Syria's lowest point as the north-eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, inside the Golan Heights, at about 214 m (702 ft) below sea level. Israel has occupied and administered most of the Golan since the 1967 Six-Day War and effectively annexed it in 1981. The United States (2019) and Colombia (2026) recognise the territory as Israeli; most other states regard it as Syrian land under occupation. The shoreline therefore appears in the table as Syria's point by claim, while it is administered by Israel.
The Sea of Galilee itself is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth. Its surface moves between about 215 and 209 m below sea level depending on rainfall, and it is fed mainly by the Jordan River, which continues south down the same rift valley to the Dead Sea.
Joint No. 1: the Dead Sea Shore at About −440 m
1=. Jordan, Israel and Palestine, −440 m. The Dead Sea is bordered by Jordan to the east, the West Bank to the west and Israel to the south-west, so three countries share the same lowest point. As of 2025 its surface was 439.78 m (1,443 ft) below sea level, making its shores the lowest land on Earth. The lake lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, a pull-apart basin along the boundary between the African and Arabian plates, and it has no outlet.
The figure keeps changing. The Dead Sea is falling by more than a metre a year because water from the Jordan River has been diverted upstream since the 1960s, and a lake that covered about 1,050 km² in 1930 now spreads over roughly 605 km². Each year the "lowest point on Earth" moves a little deeper and a little further from the old beaches. Proposals to slow the decline, such as the Red Sea–Dead Sea Water Conveyance, have so far been scrapped. The lake is 304 m deep and holds around 342 grams of salt per kilogram of water, about 9.6 times the salinity of the ocean. Why it is so salty is the subject of our page on the geography of the Dead Sea.
Just Outside the Top 10: Death Valley, Turkmenistan and the Netherlands
The United States sits eleventh. Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California, is 86 m (282 ft) below sea level, the lowest point in North America, though not in the Americas. Turkmenistan follows at −81 m in the Akjagaýa depression near Sarygamysh Lake, and Eritrea at −75 m at Lake Kulul, in the Eritrean part of the same Danakil Depression that gives Ethiopia ninth place.
Ranking by lowest point hides the country most people think of first. The lowest point in the Netherlands is only 6.76 m (22 ft) below sea level, in the Zuidplaspolder north-east of Rotterdam, a lake left by soil extraction that was drained with 30 windmills between 1825 and 1840. Yet about 26% of the country's area and 21% of its population lie below sea level, kept dry since the late 16th century by dykes, canals and pumping stations. In the desert depressions above, the land is low because almost no water arrives; in the Netherlands it is low because people pump the water out. If you want the full list of nations with land below the waterline, our ranking of countries below sea level covers it, and the opposite extreme is in our list of countries with the highest elevation.