- Britannica Online Encyclopedia - Black Sea :: Physical Features - Mountain

Black Sea :: Physical features -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
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Although Austria is landlocked, its shipyards build vessels for Austria and for other countries. Between the port cities of Sinop and Samsun (Turkey), the coastline is paralleled by a rugged range of underwater mountains extending for nearly 100 miles (160 km). Beyond the shoreline a shallow shelf zone occupies about one-fourth of the entire area. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.13 May. Farther north, in the Burgaski Bay area, low mountains emerge where the Balkan Mountains of Bulgaria extend eastward. In the east and south, the coasts are steep and mountainous. It is among the most visited reserves in Ukraine, the attractions including many species of waterfowl, and is the only breeding ground in Ukraine of the gull Larus melanocephalus. It is broadest in the west and at the head of Kerch Strait but elsewhere forms a rim about 6 to 7 miles (10 to 11 km) wide, and the depth of the edge is usually less than 360 feet (110 metres). It was across its waters that, according to legend,... Known as limans, these bodies of water form at the mouths of rivers or ephemeral streams and are blocked off by... Larger saline lakes occur along the coast. Near the Bosporus outlet, the shoreline relief is moderate though still steep. One of the largest is Lake Svityaz, 11 square miles in area, in the northwest. Small saltwater lakes occur in the Black Sea Lowland and in the Crimea. Spurs of the Greater and Lesser Caucasus ranges, separated by the Kolkhida lowland, confine the Black Sea in the east, while the Pontic Mountains run along the southern coast. The Black Sea coastline is otherwise fairly regular. The Danube Water Meadows (Plavni) reserve (36,600 acres)... The grassy steppe vegetation has been preserved only in the nature reserves and preserves and in old ravines...physiography of Ukraine Ukraine...lakes, all of them small and most of them scattered over the river floodplains. The lower Dnieper basin lies within the Black Sea Lowland, in the black-soil steppe area, which has now been completely plowed up. The maximum east-west extent of the sea is about 730 miles (1,175 km), and the shortest distance between the tip of the Crimea and the Cape Kerempe to the south is about 160 miles (260 km). The mountains of the southern Crimea form the only precipitous cliff areas. The principal tributaries of the middle Dnieper are the Ros, Sula, Pesl, Vorskla, and Samara. The renowned Crimean Peninsula thrusts into the Black Sea from the north, and just to its east the narrow Kerch Strait links the sea to the smaller Sea of Azov. The shelf gives way at its edge to a slope, which is broken by submarine valleys and is steep in its upper parts. The submarine relief may be visualized as a series of concentric and occasionally asymmetrical rings. The surface area, excluding the Sea of Marmara but including the Sea of Azov, is about 178,000 square miles (461,000 square km); the Black Sea proper occupies about 163,000 square miles (422,000 square km). The young of the black sea bass (Centropristis striata) are mostly females with normal egg-laying functions; after five years, however, some of these females transform into functional males.