Landlocked States

Nebraska is the only state in the United States where all neighboring states are also landlocked and all of those neighbors' neighbors are also landlocked. Nebraska's six borders: Iowa (double-landlocked), Missouri (double), Kansas (double), Colorado (double), Wyoming (double), and South Dakota (double). To reach any ocean from Nebraska, you must cross at least two landlocked states in every direction — south through Kansas and Oklahoma to Texas, east through Iowa and Illinois or Missouri and Tennessee, west through Wyoming and Idaho or Colorado and New Mexico.

Nebraska's geographic isolation is partly the result of the rectangular survey boundaries used to divide the Great Plains. The state sits at the heart of the continent's mid-latitude interior, where both the Rocky Mountain barrier to the west and the Mississippi-Ohio river systems to the east delay ocean access. Lincoln, Nebraska is approximately 1,200 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, 1,500 miles from the Pacific, and 1,600 miles from the Atlantic — among the greatest distances from any ocean of any state capital in the contiguous U.S.

Seven of the 27 landlocked states border the Great Lakes: Illinois (Lake Michigan), Indiana (Lake Michigan), Michigan (all four lower lakes), Minnesota (Lake Superior), Ohio (Lake Erie), Pennsylvania (Lake Erie), and Wisconsin (Lakes Michigan and Superior). These states have no ocean coastline but are connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway — a 2,300-mile system of locks, canals, and channels that allows ocean-going vessels to travel from the Atlantic to Duluth, Minnesota, the westernmost Great Lakes port.

The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Seaway system handles more than 150 million metric tons of cargo annually. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Erie, and Duluth all function as international shipping ports despite being thousands of miles from any ocean. The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, jointly built by the United States and Canada, and transformed Great Lakes cities into effective ocean ports for bulk cargo including grain, iron ore, and coal. For purposes of ocean access, Great Lakes states occupy a fundamentally different position than the fully interior states of the Great Plains and Mountain West — they are landlocked by legal definition but ocean-connected by commercial reality.