Most of the land lies less than 130 feet (40 metres) above sea level.
Nearly the entire North German Plain lies less than 330 feet (100 m) above sea level.
Tikrit, believed to have been taken by the insurgents overnight, lies less than 200km from capital Baghdad.
Aleppo, a major manufacturing center that lies less than 40 miles from Syria's border with Turkey, has been a traditional area of resistance to the Assad government.
The Egyptian capital lies less than 100 miles from North Sinai, where Isis affiliate Wilayat Sinai has been targeting soldiers and police in a bloody insurgency.
If you come to Vamos in summer, the sea lies less than four miles away, with sandy beaches complete with water-sports facilities at Kalives and Georgioupoli.
But there was one institution that did want the building -- the University of Richmond, whose verdant campus lies less than three miles away.
This was Gran Roque, the tiny main settlement of Los Roques national park in Venezuela, an archipelago of coral, mangrove and sand that lies less than 100 miles north of Caracas in the Caribbean Sea.
The rooftop US spying site lies less than 150 metres from a cylinder on the British embassy which is at the centre of concerns that Britain may also have been eavesdropping on communications in the German capital.
Bashing the metal-bashers Up a creek Rags in the ruins ReprintsYet nearly half the city lies less than one metre above sea level, and scientists say groundwater extraction, which causes land subsidence, may be having a huge unseen effect.
In countries like the Netherlands, where approximately half of the land lies less than a meter above sea level, such technology is a viable alternative to repeated raising of dikes, which must be altered in accordance with rising sea levels.
