Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 531.5 square miles (1,376.6 km²), of which 259.3 square miles (671.6 km²) is land and 272.2 square miles (705.1 km² or 51.22%) is water. It is the largest town in New York in terms of total area. Excluding water, however, there are four towns in the state with more land area: Webb in Herkimer County, Long Lake in Hamilton County, Arietta in Hamilton County, and Ohio in Herkimer County.
It has coastline on both the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound. Riverhead and Southampton lie to the east, and Smithtown and Islip lie to the west.
A large part of Fire Island and the Great South Bay are in the town.
It has a large hill, known as "Bald Hill", in the hamlet of Farmingville, which marks where the glacier which formed Long Island stopped. At the top of Bald Hill is a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Telescope Hill, to the west of Bald Hill, is slightly taller and the highest point in the Town.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is located within the town.
Read more about this topic: Brookhaven, New York
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)