Geography
Herschel Island has an area of 116 km2 (45 sq mi). It is approximately 15 km (9.3 mi) by 8 km (5.0 mi) between shorelines, with a rolling tundra terrain that ranges in height from sea level to 182 m (596 ft).
The island was created from sediments that were thrust up by a lobe of Laurentide glacier ice emanating from the Mackenzie Valley and moving westward along the coastal plain approximately 30,000 years ago. There is no bedrock core to the island. The island is subject to very high rates of coastal erosion due to the ice-rich nature of the underlying permafrost, and its surface heaves and rolls down its own hillsides from the effects of frost creep and solifluction.
Read more about this topic: Herschel Island
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“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)
“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)