North Korea's geography: steep ground measured mostly from outside

How the mountains split the country east from west

Early European visitors said Korea looked like "a sea in a heavy gale", and the northern half carries most of the swell. About 80% of North Korea is mountain and upland, and every peak on the peninsula above 2,000 metres stands on its side of the border. The ground rises highest in the northeast, where the Kaema Highlands average about 1,000 metres and form what Britannica calls the topographic roof of the peninsula.

Mount Paektu rises at the northern edge of that plateau, on the border with China: an extinct volcano with a large crater lake at its summit, its lower flanks a basalt lava plateau between 1,400 and 2,000 metres. The sources do not agree on its height to the metre. Britannica gives 2,750 metres, the Wikipedia geography 2,743, and the national record on this page prints its own figure. The Hamgyong range runs northeast from the centre of the country and drops steeply to the Sea of Japan; its high point, Kwanmobong, reaches about 2,541 metres.

The Nangnim range runs north to south through the middle of the country and divides the eastern slope from the western. It makes travel between the two halves of the country difficult: Britannica counts only one railway across it, between Pyongyang and Wonsan. The Kangnam and Myohyang ranges branch off it towards the southwest, with river plains between them that open out onto the western coast. In the southeast the Taebaek range carries on into South Korea along the east coast, and its best known peak, Mount Kumgang, stands at about 1,638 metres.

Flat land is scarce and unevenly shared. The two largest plains, around Pyongyang and along the Chaeryong River, cover about 500 square kilometres each. On the east coast the mountains come down almost to the sea and the plains are narrower still. Less than 20% of the country is arable, and much of that land is free of frost for only about six months, enough for one crop a year.

Which way the rivers drain

The two rivers of the northern border both rise on Mount Paektu. The Yalu, called the Amnok in Korean, runs southwest to Korea Bay along the boundary with China. The Tumen runs northeast to the Sea of Japan, and the short boundary with Russia follows its lower course. Apart from the Tumen there is no large river on the east coast: the Yalu, the Chongchon, the Taedong, the Chaeryong and the Yesong all drain west to the Yellow Sea, and their valley plains are the main farming regions.

The lengths depend on who measured them:

The Taedong flows through Pyongyang. Lakes are small, because the region had little glacial activity, and the crust is stable enough that severe earthquakes are rare. One North Korean source counts 124 natural spas and hot springs.

What lies under the mountains is richer. Britannica puts the great bulk of the peninsula's known mineral deposits in the north, with some 200 minerals of economic value: iron ore and anthracite above all, with magnesite around Tanchon, gold, lead, zinc, tungsten and graphite. The economy article covers what is mined.

The soils are mostly poor. Britannica describes more than three fifths of them as weathered from granite and schist, brownish, sandy and low in fertility, with reddish brown soils on limestone in North Hwanghae and southern South Pyongan and grey podzols under the conifers of the Kaema Highlands. The alluvium of the valleys and coastal plains is the exception, and it is where the rice is grown.

Where the borders and the coastline run

North Korea has three land neighbours, and one of the borders is a ceasefire line. The Wikipedia geography gives the land boundaries as follows:

The boundary with China was negotiated from the late 1950s and fixed by a treaty of 1962 and a protocol of 1964. The line with South Korea is the Military Demarcation Line of the armistice of 27 July 1953, running through the middle of a demilitarised zone about 4 kilometres wide. It crosses the 38th parallel at an angle, lying south of it at the western end and north of it in the east. Its length is another figure the sources give differently: about 240 kilometres in Britannica and 250 kilometres in the Wikipedia article on the zone.

The coastline of North Korea runs to 2,495 kilometres, about a third of the peninsula's. Remote sensing has put its tidal flats at 1,483 square kilometres. The government claims territorial waters of 12 nautical miles and an exclusive economic zone of 200, and also a military boundary 50 nautical miles out in the Sea of Japan and 200 in the Yellow Sea, inside which foreign ships and aircraft need permission. In the Yellow Sea the Northern Limit Line, drawn by the United Nations Command in the early 1950s, is not recognised by North Korea, and naval clashes there were reported in 2009 and 2010. This catalogue records that the line is disputed and takes no position on it.

How long and cold the winters are

The climate is continental, with long cold winters and short wet summers, and the figures below are long-run averages from Britannica's entry as revised in September 2026. Winter runs from December to March. Mean January temperatures range from about minus 7 °C in the south to minus 23 °C in the northern interior, and Chunggang on the upper Yalu holds the lowest temperature recorded on the peninsula, minus 43.6 °C. The annual range of temperature is about 30 °C at Pyongyang and about 43 °C at Chunggang. Northerly winds from Siberia bring clear weather broken by snowstorms; Pyongyang averages highs of minus 3 °C and lows of minus 13 °C in January, and snow falls on about 37 days in an average winter.

The east coast is milder in winter by 3 to 4 °C, sheltered by the mountains and warmed by the sea. Along the coast there are about 200 frost-free days a year; on the Kaema Highlands there are fewer than 120, and the inland provinces of Chagang and Yanggang are too cold for rice.

When the rain arrives

Summer runs from June to September and brings about three fifths of the year's precipitation, carried by the monsoon from the Pacific. Pyongyang averages highs of 29 °C and lows of 20 °C in August. Most of the country receives about 1,000 millimetres a year, but the amount varies with the ranges:

Typhoons reach the peninsula on average at least once each summer or early autumn. The common pattern of hazard is a late spring drought followed by floods, and the UK Foreign Office warns that flooding is common in July and August. In 2015 the Korean Central News Agency described a drought that began in June as the worst in 100 years.

Why floods do so much damage

Water is the hazard the record returns to. The floods of 1995 were the immediate trigger of the famine described in the history article, and the damage was made worse by what had happened to the hillsides. Britannica describes illegal cutting for firewood during the fuel shortages of the 1990s, which left many slopes bare, so that the loss of forest feeds flooding in the monsoon season and flooding feeds poor harvests.

The numbers from that summer show the scale. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs reported 877 millimetres of rain in seven hours in Pyongsan county, North Hwanghae, during the storms of 30 July to 18 August 1995, and estimated the flow of the Amnok at 4.8 billion tonnes of water over 72 hours. About 70% of the country's electricity then came from hydropower, and the floods put an estimated 85% of generating capacity out of action; the dry winters and springs of 1996 and 1997 then cut the hydro output again. The dams on the Yalu and its tributaries date from Japanese rule, when, Britannica notes, the river's power was developed for industry.

The World Food Programme lists droughts, floods, typhoons and heatwaves as the disasters that cause soil leaching, erosion and landslides, and notes that even minor events cut farm output. The main season's crops, mostly rice and maize, account for about 90% of annual production. In 2026 they were planted between April and July, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported average to above-average rain from May to early August, localised flooding in low-lying western areas in July and good vegetation on satellite images in mid-August.

How much forest the slopes still hold

The two published measures of the forest point in different directions. A UN Environment Programme report of 2003 found forest on over 70% of the country, mostly on steep slopes. An estimate from satellite imagery in 2013 found that 40% of the forest cover of 1985 had been lost.

What grows is set by altitude. Around Mount Paektu and on the highlands the forest is coniferous: Siberian fir, spruce, pine and Korean pine. The western lowlands were once covered by mixed temperate forest, now left in remote patches; most of the lowlands are farmed, and the hills between carry small groves of pine with oak, linden, maple and birch. Large reserves of larch, spruce and pine remain in the northern interior. Much of the deforestation of the coastal slopes, Britannica notes, was done under Japanese rule during the Second World War. The government adopted a forest restoration policy in 2012 and promotes tree planting.

Deer, mountain goats, tigers and leopards have been pushed back into the remote forests. Cranes, herons and migratory waterfowl still feed in the rice fields, and the country spans three terrestrial ecoregions: the Central Korean deciduous forests, the Changbai Mountains mixed forests and the Manchurian mixed forests.

What survives inside the demilitarised zone

The zone was farmland before 1950 and a battlefield until 1953, and since then it has been left almost untouched. Britannica describes it as a de facto nature reserve of forest, estuary and wetland, with endangered white-naped and red-crowned cranes, Asiatic black bears and lynx. The Wikipedia article on the zone counts over 6,000 species of plants and animals in it. The 1953 agreement allows two settlements inside it, one of them Kijong-dong on the northern side.

Where people live on so little flat land

Most of the rural population lives on the coastal lowlands and in the river valleys. Villages in the plains tend to cluster at the foot of the southern slopes of hills, sheltered from the northwest wind in winter. The upper Yalu and Tumen valleys have logging settlements, and fishing villages line both coasts, more of them on the east. The interior of Chagang and Yanggang is thinly settled.

The country is divided into nine provinces, and Britannica groups them into two older regions on either side of the Nangnim range: Kwanso in the west and Kwanbuk in the east.

Pyongyang, on the Taedong near the west coast, is a separately governed city. The 2008 census counted 60.6% of the population as urban, against 60.9% in 1993, a stability the UN Population Fund attributed to a government policy of keeping the population evenly distributed. Five sites went onto UNESCO's tentative list in 2026, among them Mount Chilbo, Mount Myohyang, the Ryongmun and Songam caves and the coastal wetlands of the Yellow Sea.