Canada has by far the world's longest coastline at roughly 202,080 km — more than the next nine countries combined — followed by Norway (about 83,000 km including fjords and islands), Indonesia (around 54,700 km), Greenland (44,087 km) and Russia (37,653 km). The rankings depend heavily on how finely the coast is measured, which is why published figures for the same country can differ by a factor of two or more.
The Top 20, Ranked
These figures follow the CIA World Factbook, the most widely cited single source, so the numbers are at least internally consistent:
- 1. Canada — 202,080 km
- 2. Norway — 83,281 km (25,148 km mainland, the rest fjord and island shoreline)
- 3. Indonesia — 54,716 km
- 4. Greenland — 44,087 km (an autonomous territory of Denmark)
- 5. Russia — 37,653 km
- 6. Philippines — 36,289 km
- 7. Japan — 29,751 km
- 8. Australia — 25,760 km
- 9. United States — 19,924 km
- 10. Antarctica — 17,968 km (no sovereign state)
- 11. New Zealand — 15,134 km
- 12. China — 14,500 km
- 13. Greece — 13,676 km
- 14. United Kingdom — 12,429 km
- 15. Mexico — 9,330 km
- 16. Italy — 7,600 km
- 17. Brazil — 7,491 km
- 18. Denmark — 7,314 km
- 19. Turkey — 7,200 km
- 20. India — 7,000 km
A parallel ranking with slightly different methodology appears in the guide to countries with the longest coastlines; comparing the two is a good illustration of the measurement problem described below.
Why Canada Is So Far Ahead
Canada's 202,080 km is not a rounding artefact — it reflects genuine geography. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago contains something on the order of 36,500 islands, including Baffin Island (507,451 km², the fifth-largest island on Earth), Victoria Island and Ellesmere Island. Every one of them contributes its own perimeter.
Canada also fronts three oceans — Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific — plus Hudson Bay, an inland sea of about 1.23 million km² whose shoreline alone is longer than most countries' entire coasts. Add the fjords of British Columbia and the drowned glacial valleys of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the total climbs quickly.
The underlying cause is ice. Repeated Pleistocene glaciations scoured the Canadian Shield, gouging out troughs and basins that flooded when sea level rose. Glaciated coasts are always more intricate than coasts shaped mainly by rivers and waves — which is precisely why Norway, Greenland, Chile and Alaska all rank far above their land area. More on the country behind the number is in the Canada country guide.
The Measurement Problem Nobody Can Solve
Coastline length is not a fixed quantity. It depends on the length of the measuring stick — a result formalised by Lewis Fry Richardson in the 1950s and later named the coastline paradox by Benoit Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper "How Long Is the Coast of Britain?".
The logic is simple. Measure Britain's coast in 100 km segments and you get roughly 2,800 km. Measure in 50 km segments and the line follows more bays and headlands, giving about 3,400 km. Keep shrinking the ruler and the figure keeps rising, in principle without limit, because each finer scale reveals more detail — inlets, then rock outcrops, then individual pebbles. Coastlines are statistically fractal.
This is why the UK appears as 12,429 km in the Factbook but around 17,800 km in Ordnance Survey figures that trace the coast at higher resolution. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions. Practical consequences follow:
- Any ranking is only valid if every country was measured at the same resolution — and across sources, they often were not.
- Countries with many small islands and deep inlets gain the most from fine-resolution mapping, so their rank is the least stable.
- Tidal range matters too: on a gently shelving coast, low tide and high tide trace measurably different lines.
The Four Processes That Build a Long Coast
Countries do not end up near the top of this list by accident. Four distinct processes generate high coastline-to-area ratios, and most leading nations owe their position to one or two of them.
- Glacial drowning. Ice sheets carved deep U-shaped troughs below present sea level; when the ice melted, the sea flooded them. This produced Norway's fjords, Canada's Arctic channels, Greenland's inlets and the Chilean and Alaskan archipelagos. It is the single most productive coastline-lengthening process on Earth.
- Volcanic archipelago building. Subduction zones throw up long chains of islands, each with its own perimeter. Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan all sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, and their high rankings come almost entirely from island count rather than mainland shape.
- River drowning. Rising post-glacial seas flooded river valleys to make rias — the branching inlets of south-west England, Galicia in Spain, and the Chesapeake Bay, which alone contributes several thousand kilometres to the United States total.
- Tectonic fragmentation. Where crust is stretched and broken, the sea invades the low blocks. The Aegean is the clearest example, and it is why Greece has such an extraordinary coast for a country of modest size.
Coasts shorten as well. Deltas building seaward — the Nile, the Mississippi, the Ganges-Brahmaputra — smooth an irregular shoreline into a simple convex curve, and long-shore drift straightens coasts by cutting back headlands and filling bays with sediment. Over geological time, wave action is a simplifying force; ice and tectonics are complicating ones.
Coastline Against Land Area: A Very Different League Table
Ranking by raw length rewards large countries. Dividing coastline by land area produces an almost entirely different list, dominated by small island states.
The Maldives has about 644 km of coastline for only 298 km² of land — a ratio above 2 km of shore per km² of territory. Nations like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and the Bahamas score similarly, being little more than coastline with a thin strip of land attached.
Among larger countries, Greece stands out: 13,676 km of coast for 131,957 km² of land, thanks to roughly 6,000 islands and islets of which around 227 are inhabited. Norway and the Philippines rank high on this measure too. At the other extreme sit countries with vast interiors and short shores — Brazil has 7,491 km of coast for 8.5 million km² of land, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has just 37 km of Atlantic frontage for the second-largest country in Africa.
And 44 or 45 states, depending on how you count partially recognised ones, have no coastline whatsoever. Two — Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan — are doubly landlocked, meaning every neighbour is landlocked as well.
What a Long Coast Is Actually Worth
Coastline length has real economic weight, but not in the way it first appears. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a state may claim an exclusive economic zone extending 200 nautical miles (370 km) from its baselines, with rights over fishing, oil, gas and seabed minerals.
Crucially, EEZ size depends on the position of territory, not the crinkliness of its shore. A single remote island generates a circular zone of roughly 430,000 km², while a deeply indented mainland coast generates almost nothing extra, because the fjords lie inside the baseline. That is why France — ranked outside the coastline top 20 — controls one of the largest EEZs on Earth through scattered Pacific and Indian Ocean territories, and why the United States, with fewer than 20,000 km of coast, holds the largest maritime zone of all.
Canada's case is instructive in the opposite direction. Despite the longest coastline in the world, much of it is Arctic and ice-bound for large parts of the year, with few natural deep-water ports in the far north. Indonesia, ranked third, gets far more practical value from its shoreline: its 17,000-plus islands sit astride the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok straits, through which a substantial share of world seaborne trade passes.
Norway Compared With Chile: Two Fjord Coasts, Different Rankings
Norway and Chile are worth setting side by side because they were shaped by the same process yet land in very different places on the table.
Both are long, narrow countries with glaciated coasts facing an open ocean, and both have a southern fjord region carved by Pleistocene ice sheets. Chile stretches roughly 4,300 km north to south — longer than Norway's roughly 1,750 km mainland span — and its Patagonian archipelago is genuinely comparable to Norway's skerry belt in complexity.
Yet the Factbook gives Norway 83,281 km and Chile 6,435 km, a thirteenfold gap that no real difference in shape can justify. The explanation is methodological. Norway's figure explicitly includes the shoreline of its roughly 240,000 islands and islets and the full length of every fjord — Sognefjorden alone runs 205 km inland. Chile's figure is measured far more coarsely and does not resolve its southern islands at the same detail.
There is a genuine geographic difference underneath, though. Norway's coast is warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, so even Arctic ports like Narvik stay ice-free year round, and the skerry belt provides a sheltered inshore passage — the Hurtigruten route — used continuously since the Viking age. Chile's fjord coast is stormy, sparsely populated and largely bypassed, with most shipping running offshore. Similar rock, similar ice history, opposite human outcomes.
The honest summary is that Canada leads any coastline ranking by a wide margin, that the numbers below it shift with measurement resolution, and that coastline length tells you much less about maritime power than the location of a country's outlying islands does. To see how these coasts sit within their wider regions, the Norway country guide is a good next stop.