How long is the Lena River? The river Mercator stretches
The Lena is about 4,400 km (2,734 miles) long. It is the eleventh longest river in the world, it lies entirely in Russia, and on a Mercator map it looks longer than the Nile and the Amazon.
Lay the Lena over your country
The river and a country at one scale. Pick a country, drag the river or switch the globe to the Mercator map.
Lena: about 4,400 km (2,734 miles), about 1.1 times the straight-line distance from New York to Los Angeles (about 3,940 km).
Drag the river with your finger or mouse. It moves over the globe without changing shape or length, and its north stays up. The globe keeps the true proportions; on the Mercator map you can see how a river moved north grows.
Where the Lena flows
The Lena begins in the Baikal Mountains, just beyond the western shore of Lake Baikal, but it flows away from the lake: north through Yakutia to the Laptev Sea. Yakutsk stands on the Lena, and at its mouth the river forms one of the largest deltas in the world.
The Lena basin covers about 2.42 million km². At its mouth the river carries about 17,000 m³/s of water on average, less than the Yenisei and more than the Ob. The Lena runs far to the north, between 54° and 72° north latitude, so the Mercator map stretches it by more than double.
Rivers of similar length, straightened
Rivers drawn at one scale. Straighten them to compare their lengths and see how they look on a Mercator map.
On a Mercator map: about 9,500 km
On a Mercator map the Lena looks about 9,500 km long (×2.17 its true length). Its course lies far from the equator, so the map stretches it by about 117%. On a globe and in the tables the difference disappears.
Open the Mercator mapHow long is it really?
About 4,400 km is the length given in the Encyclopædia Britannica table. Other sources give slightly less, because the result depends on which arm of the delta counts as the mouth and on how detailed the map is.
The line on this page's maps is about 3,946 km long, shorter than the sources say, because a 1:10 million map smooths the bends and the mouth. That is why lengths here come from the sources, not from the drawing.
Lena: questions and answers
The Lena is about 4,400 km (2,734 miles) long according to Encyclopædia Britannica. It is the eleventh longest river in the world.
The Lena begins in the Baikal Mountains, just beyond the western shore of Lake Baikal.
The Lena flows into the Laptev Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, through a wide delta.
Russia only, mostly through Yakutia.
The Mercator map enlarges everything more the farther it lies from the equator. The Lena runs far to the north and looks about 9,500 km long on that map, although it is about 4,400 km. The Nile flows close to the equator and looks about 7,000 km long.