The tiny city-state of Monaco, situated along the French Riviera, features the shortest coastline of any country in the world at just 2.5 miles long. However, the country is currently in the midst of a plan to develop its infrastructure and extend its coastline even farther into the Mediterranean, which is set to be complete in 2025.

Senegal’s Pointe des Almadies is the westernmost point in continental Africa, though the island of Santo Antao in Cape Verde sits even farther west in the Atlantic. Ras Hafun in Somalia is the continent's easternmost point. Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest point, while the lowest point on the continent is Lake Assal in Djibouti.

Less than 300 people live in Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago. To access this British Overseas Territory, you can’t even fly — it has no airstrip. Instead, the journey takes at least six days by boat from South Africa.

Surrounded by jungle, Iquitos is a key port city in the Amazon Basin, where the Nanay and Itaya rivers meet. No road can be built through the dense Amazonian rainforest, so people can only reach Iquitos by plane or a weeklong boat journey on the Amazon. Despite the remote location, Iquitos is home to more than 400,000 people and has become a bustling center for business and tourism.

No spot on American soil sits further south than Rose Atoll in the territory of American Samoa. The country’s easternmost point, including territories, is Point Udall in Saint Croix, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Interestingly, the westernmost point, in Guam, is also called Point Udall. The northernmost point in the country lies within the state of Alaska.

The Dry Valleys of Antarctica more than deserve their name — this area has an average annual rainfall of exactly 0 inches. And that’s been the case for around 2 million years, making it the driest place on Earth. The valleys have extremely low humidity, due to 200 mph winds that quickly evaporate any moisture, and mountains block sea ice from entering the valleys making it the largest ice-free region in Antarctica.

Bolivia, not Ethiopia, is home to Earth’s flattest place. The Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia covers over 4,000 square miles, making it nearly as large as Connecticut and over 20 times larger than America’s largest salt flat in Death Valley. There’s no more than a single meter of variation in altitude throughout all of Salar de Uyuni.

By most accounts, Kaffeklubben Island, just off Greenland’s northern coast, is Earth’s northernmost point of land. But a 120-square-foot pile of dirt and rocks called “83-42” several miles north of Kaffeklubben Island has been discovered more recently, and it sits just 432 miles from the North Pole. However, 83-42 occasionally disappears beneath the waves, so Kaffeklubben Island still retains its status as the northernmost permanent landmass.

Ojos del Salado is located on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert on the Argentina-Chile border. Standing 21,615 feet high, it’s the highest active volcano in the world, as well as the second-highest mountain outside of the Himalayas range (home to Mount Everest). The world’s highest crater lake sits on the peak’s eastern side at 20,965 feet above sea level.

Located over 1,000 miles from three island coasts, Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean is the farthest point from land in the world. It’s so distant that the closest humans are often astronauts, and the closest inhabited landmass, Motu Nui of the Easter Islands, is more than 1,600 miles away.

The 29,035-foot Mount Everest may be taller from base to peak, but Ecuador’s 20,548-foot Mount Chimborazo is actually closer to the moon. The planet’s rotation causes Earth to bulge slightly at the equator; this puts Mount Chimborazo — one latitudinal degree south of the equator — 1.5 miles closer to the moon than Everest.

No point in the contiguous U.S. is located further south than Ballast Key, an island in the Florida Keys which is part of the Key West National Wildlife Refuge. A few other small tracts of land sit a bit further south, but since they are periodically submerged beneath water they do not qualify. The southernmost incorporated place in the contiguous U.S. is Key West, Florida.

Northwest Angle, Minnesota, is the northernmost point in the contiguous U.S., but it is mostly surrounded by Canada thanks to a 17th-century mapmaking error. The only way to travel there from the lower 48 by car is to go through the Canadian provinces of Manitoba or Ontario. If you don’t have a passport, your only option is to take a boat across Lake of the Woods.

Siberia is home to Oymyakon, the coldest permanently-inhabited place on Earth. Oymyakon sees stark extremes; temperatures average below zero degrees Fahrenheit from November through March. In 1933, Oymyakon also recorded the coldest temperature outside of Antarctica: a whopping -90 degrees.

The Dead Sea is the lowest body of water on the planet — and it’s only getting lower. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Dead Sea had a surface level of about 1,300 feet below sea level. An increase in the lake’s commercial use and the diversion of water from its primary source caused the level to drop to 1,410 feet below sea level by 2010. It continues to shrink around three feet each year.

At an elevation of 11,975 feet above sea level, La Paz, Bolivia, is the highest-elevation capital in the world — and the records don’t stop there. The cable car connecting La Paz to neighboring El Alto (elevation 13,615 feet) is the world’s highest cable car ride. Meanwhile, Santiago, the capital of Chile, sits at an elevation of about 1,700 feet.

The Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped trench just east of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, contains Earth’s deepest-known point: the Challenger Deep. This point on the southern end of the Mariana Trench is estimated to be around 36,000 feet deep. The pressure in the trench is 1,000 times greater than that at sea level.

Reaching 20,310 feet above sea level in south-central Alaska, Denali is the highest point in the country. Formerly called Mount McKinley, Denali is also the tallest mountain in North America. California’s Mount Whitney, which reaches an elevation of 14,505 feet, is the tallest peak in the contiguous U.S.

The tallest mountain in the world, Mount Everest happens to exist on the border between China and Nepal — making it the highest-elevation international border in the world. While the peak may represent a difficult physical obstacle, it has proven to be a uniting force between the two nations. In 2020, they worked together to re-measure the mountain, bumping it from 29,031.7 feet to 29,028.87 feet.

Located two miles northwest of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the U.S. is denoted by a plaque at the end of the K-191 state road. The actual exact midpoint is about a half mile from the plaque and can be found in the center of a nearby field that once served as a hog farm.