This is a list of places on land below mean sea level. Places artificially created such as tunnels, mines, basements, and dug holes, or places under water, or existing temporarily as a result of ebbing of sea tide etc., are not included. Places where seawater and rainwater is pumped away are included. Fully natural places below

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised ...

require a dry climate; otherwise, rain would exceed

evaporation Evaporation is a type of vaporization that occurs on the surface of a liquid as it changes into the gas phase. High concentration of the evaporating substance in the surrounding gas significantly slows down evaporation, such as when humidi ...

and fill the area. All figures are in meters below mean sea level (as locally defined), arranged by depth, lowest first:

Africa

Antarctica

Asia

Europe

North America

Oceania

South America

Historic and ice-covered areas

Deeper and larger than any of the trenches in the list above is the Bentley Subglacial Trench in Antarctica, at a depth of . It is subglacial, covered permanently by the largest glacier in the world. Therefore, it is not included in any list on the page. If the ice melted it would be covered by sea. The biggest dry land area below sea level that has been known to exist during the geological past, as measured by continuous volume of atmospheric air below sea level, was the dry bed of the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...

of the late Miocene period during the

Messinian salinity crisis The Messinian salinity crisis (MSC), also referred to as the Messinian event, and in its latest stage as the Lago Mare event, was a geological event during which the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of partial or nearly complete desiccation (dry ...

References

External links

* * * {{cite web, url=http://geology.com/below-sea-level/ , website=geology.com, title=Land Below Sea Level

Elevation The elevation of a geographic location is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface (see Geodetic datum § Vertic ...

Sea Level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardised ...

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