Countries and Places Below Sea Level

About 26% of the Netherlands lies below sea level, according to the Dutch government’s environmental assessment agency, PBL. A wider 59% could flood from the sea or rivers without its defences. The often-quoted “55% below sea level” was a mistake in a 2007 IPCC report, which PBL corrected: that figure was the area at risk of flooding, not the area below the sea.

A polder is a piece of low ground ringed by a dike and kept dry by pumping. Water seeps in and rain falls in, so the pumping never stops. Much of the low land is also sinking, which makes the job harder over time.

Two floods shaped today’s defences. After the flood of 1916, the country adopted Cornelis Lely’s plan to close off the Zuiderzee, an arm of the North Sea. The Afsluitdijk dam shut the last gap on 28 May 1932, and the sea behind it became the IJsselmeer, a lake. New land followed inside it: the Wieringermeer, the Noordoostpolder and the two Flevoland polders, about 165,000 hectares in all.

Then, on the night of 31 January 1953, a spring tide and a northwesterly storm broke dikes across the southwest and killed 1,836 people in the Netherlands. Within weeks a committee was at work on the Delta Works, which closed off the estuaries of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt. Its centrepiece, the Oosterscheldekering, is a barrier that stays open to the tide and closes only for severe storms.

Much of New Orleans lies below sea level and has no natural drainage, so canals and pumps carry away even ordinary rain. Figures vary with how the city is measured, but the usual estimate is about half of the metro area.

After the levees failed in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the US Army Corps of Engineers built the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System: 133 miles of levees, floodwalls, gates and pumps, at about $14.5 billion. It is designed for a 100-year storm, which means it is not designed to stop everything.

The land keeps settling. The Corps itself has warned that without further raising of the levees to offset settling, sinking land and sea-level rise, the risk will grow.

The Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden drained this marsh in eastern England for the Bedford Level scheme, contracted in 1630 and finished in 1637. It worked, and then it caused its own problem: drained peat dries, shrinks and blows away, so the fields sank below the rivers meant to drain them.

Gravity could no longer do the job. Only with the steam pumps from about 1820 did the Fens properly dry out.

The Holme Fen post shows how far the ground has dropped. An iron post was sunk to the clay in 1852 with its top level with the ground. It now stands about 4 m clear of it.

In Kuttanad, farmers grow rice below sea level on land reclaimed from Vembanad Lake. They built earth bunds to hold back the salt water, bailed the fields out, and now pump them with engines and electric motors.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization listed it in 2013 as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. Fish live alongside the rice, and after harvest ducks are brought in to feed on the fields and manure them.

Rising salinity is now a threat to the crop.

Japan drained this large coastal lagoon with Dutch advice: two Dutch reclamation experts were invited in 1954. Work began in 1957, and by 1977 it had become 17,203 hectares of farmland, with a new village, Ōgata, founded in 1964 as a model of mechanised rice farming.

The polder floor lies about 4.5 m below sea level. A tidal gate, a central drain and two pumping stations, each moving 40 tonnes of water a second, keep it dry.

Denmark closed off the inner part of this fjord and pumped it dry in 1873–1875. Its floor, about 7 m below sea level, ranks with the Netherlands’ Zuidplaspolder as the lowest land in the European Union. Only the Caspian shores, in Russia, lie lower in Europe.

From the late 1800s, more than 60 islands in this delta were cleared and drained for farming. Once dry, the peat soil began to break down into the air. The USGS names this decay as the main cause of the sinking.

Islands that began near sea level now have large areas over 15 feet (about 4.5 m) below it, and they are shaped like saucers. Ditches hold the water table a few feet down, and the levees hold back the rivers. The deeper the islands sink, the more those levees have to bear.

Guyana’s capital sits as much as 2 m below high tide, behind a sea wall. Its canals and polders date back to Dutch rule. Rain drains out through kokers, sluice gates that keepers open when the tide is low and close when it is high.

This makes the timing tight: heavy rain at high tide has nowhere to go. In November 2022 rain left knee-deep floods because the kokers could not open, and in 2013 a high tide smashed a koker door at Kingston.

About 40% of Jakarta now lies below sea level, mostly in the north. Northern districts have dropped as much as 4 m over four decades, and parts of the coast are reported to sink up to 14 cm a year. The main cause is people pumping out deep groundwater, along with the weight of the city above it.

The planned answer is a giant sea wall across Jakarta Bay. Critics point out that a wall does not stop the sinking, which only ends when the pumping does.

From about 1910, factories in Tokyo’s Koto district pumped so much groundwater that the ground sank. Laws from 1961 and 1963 and tighter limits in the 1970s slowed it, which makes Tokyo the example of how to stop sinking.

The ground did not come back. About 124 square kilometres, home to some 1.5 million people, still lies below sea level at high tide. Typhoons flooded the area in 1947 and 1958, and it now sits behind 15 floodgates, 21 embankments and about 60 km of seawall on Tokyo Bay.

The shore of the Dead Sea is the lowest dry land on Earth, at about 440 m below sea level in 2025. It keeps getting lower, by about a metre a year, as the Jordan River that feeds the lake is taken for farms and towns before it arrives.

High ground separates this rift valley from the sea, so no dike is needed. It could only flood if the sea climbed over the rim, which is why this map keeps it dry.

A crater lake in central Djibouti, Lake Assal is the lowest point on land in Africa. Sources put it between 153 m and 157 m below sea level.

The Turpan Depression’s lowest point, the mostly dry lakebed of Aydingkol, is about 154 m below sea level and the lowest ground in China. The sea is no concern here. The problem is water, in one of the driest and hottest places in the country.

Its answer is the karez: tunnels dug by hand that carry meltwater by gravity from the foot of the Tian Shan. Being underground, the water barely evaporates. A 2003 count found about 5,272 km of these channels in Xinjiang, nearly all around Turpan and Hami. The Karez wells have been on China’s tentative list for World Heritage status since 2008.

At about 133 m below sea level, the Qattara Depression is Africa’s second-lowest point. It lies in Egypt’s Western Desert, with no settlements inside it. A band of higher desert ground keeps the Mediterranean out.

The Danakil Depression in Ethiopia reaches about 125 m below sea level, and its Eritrean part about 75 m below, according to the CIA World Factbook. Workers still mine salt on its floor.

Badwater Basin, in Death Valley, is the lowest point in North America, about 86 m (282 ft) below sea level. Mountains on every side keep the ocean far away.

The Salton Sink is a desert basin in southern California. In 1905 an irrigation canal breached, and the Colorado River poured in for nearly two years, creating the Salton Sea by accident. Towns such as Calipatria and Brawley lie well below sea level around it.

The Caspian has no outlet, and its surface lies about 28 m below the ocean. Whole cities live below sea level here, among them Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The low ground around it, the Caspian Depression, covers about 200,000 square kilometres.

At about 105 m below sea level, this salt lagoon in Santa Cruz province is lower than anywhere in North America, and the lowest point in the Americas.