The most isolated cities in the catalogue
From Suva, Fiji, the nearest other city in this catalogue is North Shore, New Zealand, 2,108 km away across open ocean. The median city in the catalogue has a neighbour 24 km off.
The eighteen most isolated cities in the catalogue
How the distances were computed
Each city's coordinates are converted into a unit vector on a sphere, and the whole catalogue is swept pairwise: roughly twenty million comparisons, from which we keep, for each city, the single nearest other city and how far away it is. The distance is a great circle arc on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 kilometres, which is Earth's mean radius. That is the figure in the table.
A sphere is not quite the right shape. Earth is flattened at the poles by about a part in three hundred, so a great circle distance can be out by a few kilometres over a very long arc. At the scale of this ranking, where first place beats second by hundreds of kilometres, that error changes nothing, and using the exact ellipsoid would change the numbers by less than the rounding already applied.
The scope caveat is the whole story on this page, so it is worth being blunt about it. This measures distance to the nearest city in our catalogue, which holds 6,338 settlements above 100,000 people plus 448 smaller originals. It is not distance to the nearest human being, or the nearest town, or the nearest airstrip. A city with a ring of 40,000-person towns around it will look isolated here and is not.
Why the leaders are all islands and Arctic outposts
Read down the table and two kinds of place appear. The first is the ocean island: a city with a large population and nothing of comparable size within a thousand kilometres in any direction, because the surrounding area is water. Suva, Fiji is the extreme case, and its nearest catalogued neighbour, North Shore, New Zealand, is 2,108 km away with open Pacific in between.
The second is the high-latitude outpost: a city built where a resource or a port made it worth building, surrounded by land that supports nothing else of any size. Those are the entries in Siberia, northern Canada and Alaska, and their isolation is measured over ground rather than water, which makes it more surprising rather than less. You can drive from most of them, in principle, for a very long time.
Isolation and the clock
An isolated city usually gets its own time zone, or shares one with almost nobody, because there is no neighbouring population centre to align with. Several cities on this list are the only significant settlement on their zone, which means the zone's rules are effectively decided for them alone, and a change to those rules affects a single city. The solo offsets page covers the extreme version of that, where an entire UTC offset belongs to one zone.
The opposite situation, two cities close enough to see the same weather but on clocks hours apart, is the subject of the clock gap per kilometre ranking. Between them the two pages make the point that physical distance and clock distance are only loosely related, and that the places where they come apart are the interesting ones.
Questions about this ranking
- Which is the most isolated city in the world?
- By this measure Suva, Fiji, 2,108 km from North Shore, New Zealand. Perth is the usual answer to this question and does not win here, because the catalogue contains several smaller Western Australian cities near it.
- What counts as the nearest city?
- The nearest of the 6,338 settlements we publish, which means places above 100,000 people plus 448 smaller ones. It is not the nearest town or the nearest inhabited place.
- How is the distance measured?
- As a great circle arc on a sphere of radius 6,371.0088 km. Earth's polar flattening makes that a few kilometres out over very long arcs, which does not affect the ordering here.
- Does isolation affect a city’s time zone?
- Often, yes. An isolated city has no neighbouring population to align with, so it frequently ends up as the only significant settlement on its zone.