Geography of Chicago
The city of Chicago lies in the Chicago Plain, a flat and broad area characterized by little topographical relief. The few low hills here and there are sand ridges. North of the Chicago Plain, steep bluffs and ravines run alongside Lake Michigan.
Along the southern shore of the Chicago Plain, sand dunes run alongside the lake. The tallest dunes reach up to near 200 feet (61 m) and are found in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Surrounding the low plain are bands of moraines in the south and west suburbs. These areas are higher and hillier than the Chicago Plain. A continental divide, separating the Mississippi River watershed from that of the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River, runs through the Chicago area.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Metropolitan Area
Famous quotes containing the words geography of and/or geography:
“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 (18221893)
“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)