The equator is the only line on this site with a physical cause you can feel. It's where the planet bulges, where it spins fastest, and where the sun passes directly overhead twice a year. Stand on it and you're travelling east at about 1,670 km/h without lifting a foot.
Ten countries show up in the border data below. Thirteen is the number you'll usually see quoted, and the gap between the two is islands: two of the thirteen are water crossings between atolls rather than anything you could stand on. The map draws the full 40,075 km circle, so zoom in wherever you need to.
The crossings are nothing like each other in size. Brazil gets more than 2,000 km of equator through the Amazon basin. Somalia gets about 200 km of dry scrub inland of Kismayo. Both count as one country in a headline figure, which is roughly the problem with headline figures.
Worked out by intersecting the line with national borders, so the order is the order you’d meet them tracing the line west to east. Tap any row to fly the map to that crossing.
| # | Country | Enters and leaves | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 510 km | ||
| 2 | 630 km | ||
| 3 | 2,180 km | ||
| 4 | 520 km | ||
| 5 | 420 km | ||
| 6 | 1,350 km | ||
| 7 | 450 km | ||
| 8 | 790 km | ||
| 9 | 210 km | ||
| 10 | 1,510 km |
These are real crossings that the 1:110 million borders can’t represent, listed here rather than quietly dropped. Small islands are almost always the reason. Add them to the computed table if you need a complete answer.
Four of the seven great lines are defined by the tilt of the Earth's axis, which wobbles, so those four move. The equator doesn't. It's fixed by the axis of rotation itself, sitting exactly halfway between the poles, and it would still be in the same place if the tilt went to zero tomorrow.
That stability has consequences you can measure. Day length on the equator stays within a couple of minutes of twelve hours all year. There's no summer and no winter here in the sense the rest of the world means them, only wet seasons and dry ones. The Coriolis effect falls to nothing, which is why tropical cyclones never form within about 5° of the line.
Rocket launches lean on the same geometry. A pad on the equator gets a free 465 m/s eastward from the Earth's rotation, which is why the European Space Agency launches from Kourou in French Guiana at 5°N rather than from anywhere in Europe. Cape Canaveral at 28°N gives up about 55 m/s of that, and in rocketry that difference is paid for in propellant.
Mostly it looks like nothing, because the equator runs over water for roughly four fifths of its length. The Pacific leg is the longest unbroken stretch of water on any of these seven lines: about 17,000 km from the Indonesian islands to the coast of Ecuador, interrupted only by a few of Kiribati's atolls and the northern tip of Isabela in the Galápagos.
Where it does hit land, people have built on it. Ecuador has two markers: the monument at Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, put up in the 1970s on a French survey from 1736, and the real line, which GPS later placed about 240 m north of it. The Museo Intiñan next door charges visitors to stand on the correct spot.
Macapá in Brazil has a football stadium, the Estádio Milton Corrêa, built so the halfway line sits on the equator. Each team defends a goal in a different hemisphere. Pontianak in Indonesia has a monument where, for a few minutes around the March and September equinoxes, vertical objects cast essentially no shadow. Nanyuki in Kenya has a sign, a souvenir stall, and more water-swirling demonstrations.
The Coriolis-and-plughole trick is nonsense at that scale, by the way. The force involved is orders of magnitude weaker than the swirl you get from the shape of the basin and how the water went in. The demonstrators cheat by pouring from a jug with a little spin on it.
The catch is resolution. Ten thousand points for the whole world means smoothed coastlines, islands that vanish entirely, and entry points that can sit 20 or 30 km from where a surveyor would put them, which is why distances are rounded to the nearest 10 km. The order of the countries is solid. The last digit of any single figure isn't. Crossings the data is too coarse to hold get named under the table rather than quietly folded in.