Global Environment.com

Europe

Europe is a small continent, topographically subdivided by shallow shelf seas into a mainland block with a sprawl of surrounding peninsulas and off-lying islands. Its western, northern and southern limits are defined by coastlines and conventions. Of the off-lying islands, Iceland, Svalbard, the Faroes and Britain are included. So are the larger islands of the Mediterranean Sea, though more on the grounds of their conquest and habitation by Europeans than by their geographical proximity to Europe.

Europe covers an area of 1.9 million sq miles. It extends from well north of the Arctic Circle almost to latitude 34°N, and includes a wide range of topographies and climates - from polders below sea-level to high Alpine peaks, from semi-deserts to polar ice-caps. Its geological structure, and some of the forces that have shaped it, show up clearly on a physical map.

In the far north lies a shield of ancient granites and gneisses occupying northern Scandinavia, Finland and Karelia. This underlies and gives shape to the rugged lowlands of this area. The highlands formed later: north and east of the platform lay a marine trough, which was raised, compressed and folded by lateral pressure about 400 million years ago to form the highlands - now well eroded but still impressive - of Norway and north-west Britain.

To the south lay another deep-sea trough, from which a vast accumulation of sediments was raised about 300 million years ago, producing the belt of highlands and well-worn uplands that stretch across Europe from Spain to southern Poland. They include the Cantabrian and central mountains of Iberia, the French Massif Central and uplands of Brittany, the Vosges, Ardennes and Westernwald, the Black Forest, the hills of Cornwall, South Wales and south-west Ireland. A third trough, the Tethys Sea, formed still further south and extended in a wide swathe across Europe and Asia. Strong pressure from a northward-drifting Africa slowly closed the sea, to form the present-day Mediterranean, and raised the 'Alpine' mountains that fringe it - the Atlas of North Africa, the Sirrea Nevada of Spain, the Pyrenees, the Alps themselves, the Apennines, the Carpathians and Dinaric Alps, and the ranges of the Balkan Peninsula.

More recently still, however, came the Ice Age. The first ice sheets formed across Eurasia and north America from two to three million years ago; during the last million years there has been four glacial periods in the Alps and three, maybe more, in Scandinavia. The lowland ice melted eight to ten thousand years ago, and the Scandinavian and Alpine glaciers retreated, only Iceland and Svalbard keeping icecaps. The accompanying rise in sea-level finally isolated Britain.

Lake District, Cumbria, England

Venice

 
Switzerland