An inland sea (also known as an epeiric sea or an epicontinental sea) is a continental body of water which is very large in area and is either completely surrounded by dry land or connected to an ocean by a river, strait or "arm of the sea". An inland sea will generally have higher salinity than a freshwater lake, but usually lower salinity than seawater. As with other seas, inland seas experience tides governed by the orbits of the Moon and Sun. [1]
What constitutes an "inland sea" is complex and somewhat necessarily vague. [2] The United States Hydrographic Office defined it as "a body of water nearly or completely surrounded by land, especially if very large or composed of salt water". [3]
Geologic engineers Heinrich Ries and Thomas L. Watson say an inland sea is merely a very large lake. [2] Rydén, Migula, and Andersson [4] and Deborah Sandler of the Environmental Law Institute add that an inland sea is "more or less" cut off from the ocean. [5] [4] It may be semi-enclosed, [4] or connected to the ocean by a strait or "arm of the sea". [5] An inland sea is distinguishable from a bay in that a bay is directly connected to the ocean. [5]
The term "epeiric sea" was coined by Joseph Barrell in 1917. He defined an epeiric sea as a shallow body of water whose bottom is within the wave base (e.g., where bottom sediments are no longer stirred by the wave above). [6] An epeiric sea as one with limited connection to an ocean, [7] [8] [4] and shallow. [4] [lower-alpha 1] An inland sea is only an epeiric sea when a continental interior is flooded by marine transgression due to sea level rise or epeirogenic movement. [6] [9]
An epicontinental sea is synonymous with an epeiric sea. [9] The term "epicontinental sea" may also refer to the waters above a continental shelf. This is a legal, not geological, term. [10] Epeiric, epicontinental, and inland seas occur on a continent, not adjacent to it. [4]
The law of the sea does not apply to inland seas. [11]
In modern times, continents stand high, eustatic sea levels are low, and there are few inland seas.
The Great Lakes, despite being completely fresh water, have been referred to as resembling or having characteristics like inland seas from a USGS management perspective. Lake Ontario is the only Great Lake connected to the Atlantic Ocean after Niagara Falls. [15] [16]
Modern examples might also include the recently (less than 10,000 years ago) reflooded Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea that presently covers the Sunda Shelf. [lower-alpha 2]
At various times in the geologic past, inland seas covered central areas of continents during periods of high sea level that result in marine transgressions. Inland seas have been greater in extent and more common than at present.
Africa is a continent comprising 63 political territories, representing the largest of the great southward projections from the main mass of Earth's surface. Within its regular outline, it comprises an area of 30,368,609 km2 (11,725,385 sq mi), excluding adjacent islands. Its highest mountain is Mount Kilimanjaro; its largest lake is Lake Victoria.
The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain.
A mediterranean sea is, in oceanography, a mostly enclosed sea that has limited exchange of water with outer oceans and whose water circulation is dominated by salinity and temperature differences rather than by winds or tides. The eponymous Mediterranean Sea, for example, is almost completely enclosed by Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The Continental Divide of the Americas is the principal, and largely mountainous, hydrological divide of the Americas. The Continental Divide extends from the Bering Strait to the Strait of Magellan, and separates the watersheds that drain into the Pacific Ocean from those river systems that drain into the Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, including those that drain into the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and Hudson Bay.
The Tethys Ocean, also called the Tethys Sea or the Neo-Tethys, was a prehistoric ocean during much of the Mesozoic Era and early Cenozoic Era, located between the ancient continents of Gondwana and Laurasia, before the opening of the Indian and Atlantic oceans during the Cretaceous Period.
The Western Interior Seaway was a large inland sea that split the continent of North America into two landmasses. The ancient sea, which existed from the early Late Cretaceous to the earliest Paleocene, connected the Gulf of Mexico, through the United States and Canada, to the Arctic Ocean. The two land masses it created were Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. At its largest extent, it was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long.
A marine transgression is a geologic event during which sea level rises relative to the land and the shoreline moves toward higher ground, which results in flooding. Transgressions can be caused by the land sinking or by the ocean basins filling with water or decreasing in capacity. Transgressions and regressions may be caused by tectonic events such as orogenies, severe climate change such as ice ages or isostatic adjustments following removal of ice or sediment load.
The Sundance Sea was an epeiric sea that existed in North America during the mid-to-late Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era. It was an arm of what is now the Arctic Ocean, and extended through what is now western Canada into the central western United States. The sea receded when highlands to the west began to rise.
The Zechstein is a unit of sedimentary rock layers of Late Permian (Lopingian) age located in the European Permian Basin which stretches from the east coast of England to northern Poland. The name Zechstein was formerly also used as a unit of time in the geologic timescale, but nowadays it is only used for the corresponding sedimentary deposits in Europe.
The Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex sits above Cretaceous-age strata ranging from ≈145-66 Ma. These Cretaceous-aged sediments lie above the eroded Ouachita Mountains and the Fort Worth Basin, which was formed by the Ouachita Orogeny. Going from west to east in the DFW Metroplex and down towards the Gulf of Mexico, the strata get progressively younger. The Cretaceous sediments dip very gently to the east.
The Mastogloia Sea is one of the prehistoric stages of the Baltic Sea in its development after the last ice age. This took place c. 8000 years ago following the Ancylus Lake stage and preceding the Littorina Sea stage.
The geological history of the Earth follows the major geological events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers (stratigraphy). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the Sun, which also created the rest of the Solar System.
A marine regression is a geological process occurring when areas of submerged seafloor are exposed above the sea level. The opposite event, marine transgression, occurs when flooding from the sea covers previously-exposed land.
The Turgai Strait, also known as the Turgay/TurgaiSea, Obik Sea, Ural Sea or West Siberian Sea, was a large shallow body of salt water during the Mesozoic through Cenozoic Eras. It extended north of the present-day Caspian Sea to the "paleo-Arctic" region, and was in existence from the Middle Jurassic to Oligocene, approximately 160 to 29 million years ago.
The Paratethys sea, Paratethys ocean, Paratethys realm or just Paratethys was a large shallow inland sea that stretched from the region north of the Alps over Central Europe to the Aral Sea in Central Asia.
A continental divide is a drainage divide on a continent such that the drainage basin on one side of the divide feeds into one ocean or sea, and the basin on the other side either feeds into a different ocean or sea, or else is endorheic, not connected to the open sea. Every continent on earth except Antarctica has at least one continental drainage divide; islands, even small ones like Killiniq Island on the Labrador Sea in Canada, may also host part of a continental divide or have their own island-spanning divide. The endpoints of a continental divide may be coastlines of gulfs, seas or oceans, the boundary of an endorheic basin, or another continental divide. One case, the Great Basin Divide, is a closed loop around an endoreic basin. The endpoints where a continental divide meets the coast are not always definite since the exact border between adjacent bodies of water is usually not clearly defined. The International Hydrographic Organization's publication Limits of Oceans and Seas defines exact boundaries of oceans, but it is not universally recognized. Where a continental divide meets an endorheic basin, such as the Great Divide Basin of Wyoming, the continental divide splits and encircles the basin. Where two divides intersect, they form a triple divide, or a tripoint, a junction where three watersheds meet.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to Oceanography.
This is a list of articles related to plate tectonics and tectonic plates.
The geology of the Baltic Sea is characterized by having areas located both at the Baltic Shield of the East European Craton and in the Danish-North German-Polish Caledonides. Historical geologists make a distinction between the current Baltic Sea depression, formed in the Cenozoic era, and the much older sedimentary basins whose sediments are preserved in the zone. Although glacial erosion has contributed to shape the present depression, the Baltic trough is largely a depression of tectonic origin that existed long before the Quaternary glaciation.
The geology of Somalia is built on more than 700 million year old igneous and metamorphic crystalline basement rock, which outcrops at some places in northern Somalia. These ancient units are covered in thick layers of sedimentary rock formed in the last 200 million years and influenced by the rifting apart of the Somali Plate and the Arabian Plate. The geology of Somaliland, the de facto independent country recognized as part of Somalia, is to some degree better studied than that of Somalia as a whole. Instability related to the Somali Civil War and previous political upheaval has limited geologic research in places while heightening the importance of groundwater resources for vulnerable populations.