2,436 articles
Continental divide
A continental divide is a ridge or mountain crest that separates a continent's major watersheds, sending water on each side toward different oceans or seas.
Continental rise
Continental rise: the gentle sediment apron between the continental slope and abyssal plain, built by turbidity currents and deep-sea fans, covering about 10% of the ocean floor.
Continental shelf of Russia
The continental shelf of Russia is the seabed beyond its territorial sea in the Arctic, with about 1.7 million square kilometers recognized by the UN in 2023.
Cook Strait
Cook Strait, in Māori Raukawa Moana, is the water between New Zealand's North and South Islands, linking the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific; at 22 km wide, its waters are notoriously hazardous.
Coorong National Park
Coorong National Park (Kurrangk) protects a 100-plus-km hypersaline coastal lagoon at the end of the River Murray in South Australia, a Ramsar wetland managed with barrage environmental flows and home to the Ngarrindjeri people.
Copper River (Alaska)
The Copper River is a glacial river in south-central Alaska, flowing about 290 miles from Mount Wrangell to the Gulf of Alaska and famed for its salmon runs.
Coral reef lagoon
Coral reef lagoon: the shallow, sheltered water body between a reef and shore or inside an atoll rim, connected to the ocean by channels and passes; sandy substrate, patch reefs, distinct benthic communities, lowest coral diversity on lagoon slopes.
Coral Sea
The Coral Sea is a southwestern Pacific marginal sea off northeastern Australia between the Great Barrier Reef, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, defined by the South Equatorial Current, rich marine life, and the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, the first all-carrier-aircraft naval battle.
Corduroy road
Corduroy road: a road of logs laid transversely across swampy ground, also called log crossway. Known from a 4780 BC German track, used by Civil War armies, colonists, and still in forestry.
Corner Inlet
Corner Inlet is a tide-dominated embayment in South Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, a Ramsar wetland (site 261, listed 1982, 67,071 ha) famed for migratory shorebirds, southernmost Posidonia seagrass and white mangroves.
Cornus sericea
Cornus sericea (redosier dogwood, syn. Cornus stolonifera), a deciduous North American Cornaceae shrub to 4 m of wet soils, hardy to USDA zone 2, with red winter stems, and an emerging invasive in Europe.
Cortes Bank
Cortes Bank is a shallow submarine bank about 100 miles west of San Diego on the Santa Rosa-Cortes Ridge, rising to within meters of the surface at Bishop Rock, famed for big-wave surfing and studied for offshore geology.
Cowardin classification system
The Cowardin classification system is the 1979 US Fish and Wildlife Service scheme for classifying American wetlands and deepwater habitats, now the basis of the National Wetlands Inventory.
Cuando
Cuando (Kwando) River: a 1,206 km south-central African river rising in the Angolan Highlands, flowing through Namibia and Botswana as the Linyanti and Chobe to join the Zambezi at Mambova Falls; basin over 156,000 km² shared by four countries.
Cuanza (landform)
The Cuanza River, also spelled Kwanza or Kuanza, is a river in Angola and the country's longest, rising on the Bié Plateau and reaching the Atlantic south of Luanda.
Cuba - Cayman Islands
Cuba - Cayman Islands, FEOW freshwater ecoregion 211, covers Cuba, the Canarreos Archipelago, and the Cayman Islands; merged due to related fish faunas, with the Cauto River as its largest river.
Cuito (landform)
Cuito (Kuito, Kwito) is a 920 km perennial river in southeastern Angola, the eastern headwater tributary of the Okavango River, flowing over deep Kalahari sands and providing steady dry-season baseflow to the Okavango Delta.
Cumberland Bay
Cumberland Bay is the largest fjord on South Georgia, splitting into East and West Bay and sheltering Grytviken, the whaling station founded there in 1904.
Cumberland River
The Cumberland River is a 688-mile Ohio River tributary rising at Harlan, Kentucky, looping through Nashville, Tennessee, and draining an 18,000-square-mile basin managed by nine Corps of Engineers dams for flood control, navigation, and hydropower.
Cumberland Sound
Cumberland Sound (Kangiqtualuk) is a large embayment on southeast Baffin Island, Nunavut, opening to Davis Strait. About 250 km long, a historic whaling centre visited by William Penny in 1839 and Franz Boas in 1883–84, home to Greenland halibut and a threatened beluga population.
Curonian Spit
The Curonian Spit (Kuršių nerija, Куршская коса) is a 98 km transboundary sand-dune peninsula between the Baltic Sea and Curonian Lagoon, a 2000 UNESCO cultural landscape shaped by dune stabilization works.
Cuyahoga River
The Cuyahoga River is a roughly 100-mile Ohio river flowing into Lake Erie, famous for its June 22, 1969 Cleveland fire that spurred the Clean Water Act, the EPA, and ongoing restoration.
Cuyan - Desaguadero
Cuyan - Desaguadero (FEOW ecoregion 340) is a montane freshwater ecoregion of western Argentina covering the Río Desaguadero drainage, with four endemic Trichomycterid catfishes and the Guanacache Ramsar wetlands.
Cuyuni
Cuyuni (Río Cuyuní), a river rising in Venezuela's Bolívar State and flowing through Guyana into the Essequibo near Bartica; a major Essequibo tributary central to the Venezuela–Guyana Essequibo dispute and to gold-mining mercury contamination.
Cyperus papyrus
Cyperus papyrus, also called Nile grass, is a tall aquatic sedge native to Africa and northern Israel, best known as the raw material for papyrus paper in ancient Egypt.
Daito Ridge
Daito Ridge (大東海嶺), also called Daito Mountains, is a 500-km-long east-west undersea remnant island arc at the northwestern end of the Philippine Sea plate, with 13-20 km thick Cretaceous arc crust, now subducting beneath the Ryukyu Trench.
Dal Lake
Dal Lake, an 18 sq km urban freshwater lake in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India, with four basins, houseboats, shikaras, and floating gardens (Raad), facing eutrophication and sustained restoration.
Dalälven
Dalälven, Swedish river system formed by Västerdalälven and Österdalälven; 520 km, Sweden's second longest, draining 29,030 km² to the Bothnian Sea, with about 8% of national hydropower and a timber-floating past.
Dallmann Bay
Dallmann Bay: bay between Brabant and Anvers Islands, Palmer Archipelago, Antarctica; charted 1874 by Eduard Dallmann; Eastern Dallmann Bay is protected as ASPA 153 (520 km²).
Dallol Bosso
Dallol Bosso, a fossil valley of an inactive Niger River tributary in southwestern Niger (Zarma name Boboye), is Ramsar site no. 1382, designated 26 April 2004, 892,122 ha, with a shallow alluvial aquifer and the only viable West African giraffe population.