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Watersheds of North America are large drainage basins which drain to separate oceans, seas, gulfs, or endorheic basins. There are six generally recognized hydrological continental divides which divide the continent into seven principal drainage basins spanning three oceans ( Arctic , Atlantic and Pacific ) and one endorheic basin.
The North American Cordillera extends up and down the coast of North America and roughly from the Great Plains westward to the Pacific Ocean, narrowing somewhat from north to south. It includes the Cascades , Sierra Nevada , and Basin and Range province ; the Rocky Mountains are sometimes excluded from the cordillera proper, in spite of their ...
Nevertheless, and since ocean basins are interconnected, many oceanographers prefer to refer to one single ocean basin instead of multiple ones. Older references (e.g., Littlehales 1930) [4] consider the oceanic basins to be the complement to the continents, with erosion dominating the latter, and the sediments so derived ending up in the ocean ...
The cordillera extend from Alaska into Mexico and includes two orogenic belts — the Pacific Margin on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east — separated by a system of intermontane plateaus and basins. [10] The Coastal Plain and the main belts of the North American Cordillera continue in the south in Mexico (where the Mexican Plateau ...
A map of the principal hydrological divides of North America. The Eastern Continental Divide (orange line) demarcates two watersheds of the Atlantic Ocean: the Gulf of Mexico watershed and the Atlantic Seaboard watershed.
To the north, the Atlantic Coastal Plain also broaches into the mesic hardwood forests of the Middle Atlantic coastal forests, followed by the northern Atlantic coastal pine barrens. [17] [18] [19] The southernmost Atlantic Plain contains the only Neotropical ecoregion of the continental USA, being the Everglades and Florida mangroves. [20]
Some of the largest coastal plains are in Alaska and the southeastern United States. The Gulf Coastal Plain of North America extends northwards from the Gulf of Mexico along the Lower Mississippi River to the Ohio River, which is a distance of about 981 miles (1,579 km). The Atlantic Coastal Plain runs from the New York Bight to Florida. [1]
At first, the hot, faulted edge of the continent was high and buoyant relative to the new ocean basin. As the edge of North America moved away from the hot rift zone, it began to cool and subside beneath the new Atlantic Ocean. This once-active divergent plate boundary became the passive, trailing edge of westward moving North America.