How long is the Yenisei River? From Mongolia to the Arctic
With the Angara and the Selenga, the Yenisei is about 5,540 km (3,442 miles) long. It is the fifth longest river in the world and the largest river in Russia by the water it carries.
Lay the Yenisei 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.
Yenisei: about 5,540 km (3,442 miles), about 1.4 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 Yenisei flows
The most distant sources of the Yenisei system lie in Mongolia. The Selenga flows into Lake Baikal, the Angara flows out of it, and the Angara joins the Yenisei, which runs north across Siberia to the Kara Sea.
The Yenisei basin covers about 2.58 million km². The river carries about 19,000 m³/s of water on average, the most of any river in Russia. Most of its course lies far to the north, so on a Mercator map the Yenisei looks almost twice as long as it really is.
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.
- Mississippi-Missouri: about 5,971 km
- Yenisei: about 5,540 km
- Yellow River: about 5,464 km
On a Mercator map: about 10,700 km
On a Mercator map the Yenisei looks about 10,700 km long (×1.94 its true length). Its course lies far from the equator, so the map stretches it by about 94%. On a globe and in the tables the difference disappears.
Open the Mercator mapHow long is it really?
About 5,540 km is the length of the whole Yenisei, Angara and Selenga system. Measured from the meeting of its two headstreams in Tuva, the Yenisei alone is about 3,490 km long. Both numbers are correct; they measure different things.
The line on this page's maps is about 4,900 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.
Yenisei: questions and answers
The Yenisei system with the Angara and the Selenga is about 5,540 km (3,442 miles) long according to Encyclopædia Britannica. The Yenisei alone, measured from the meeting of its two headstreams, is about 3,490 km.
The most distant sources of the system lie in the mountains of Mongolia, on the upper Selenga. The Selenga flows into Lake Baikal, which drains through the Angara into the Yenisei.
The Yenisei flows into the Kara Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean.
The Mercator map enlarges everything more the farther it lies from the equator. The Yenisei crosses Siberia, where the map scale is almost twice the scale at the equator. The Nile flows close to the equator, so it barely changes. In reality the Nile is about 1,100 km longer.