Geography
Before the 2004 earthquake, North Sentinel Island had about 72 km² and a roughly square outline. All around the island, behind a narrow beach the ground rose abruptly by 20 m, and then more gradually to 98 m near the middle. Reefs extended around the island to between 800 and 1300 meters from the shore. A forested islet, Constance Island, was located about 600 metres off the southeast coastline, at the edge of the reef.
The 2004 earthquake tilted the tectonic plate under the island, lifting it by 1 to 2 metres. Large tracts of the surrounding coral reefs were exposed and became permanently dry land or shallow lagoons, extending the boundaries of the island all around — by as much as 1 km on the west and south sides — and uniting Constance Island with the main island.
Apart from the narrow original beach and the uplifted reefs, the island is densely covered by forest.
Read more about this topic: North Sentinel Island
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“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)