Seas And Oceans Codexery

English Channel

The busiest shipping area in the world, separating Southern England from northern France.

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Globally, this shipping route sees the highest volume of vessel traffic.[1] The Channel's length is roughly 560 km, with its breadth spanning from a maximum of 240 km down to a minimum of 34 km at the Strait of Dover.[2]

Key facts and history

Another catastrophic flood some 180,000 years ago carved the Lobourg Channel, a bedrock-floored valley 500 m wide and 25 m deep.[3] The Channel's formation as an extension of the Atlantic Ocean began in the Pliocene epoch, a period spanning from roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago.[4] A catastrophic flood around 450,000 years ago, with a flow rate of up to one million cubic metres per second, eroded the ridge that had previously linked Britain to the continent.[5][3] Approximately 8,000 years ago, wheat was being transported across the Channel as a trade good.[6]

The Viking Age is widely regarded to have begun with the 793 raid on Lindisfarne.[7][8] On 25 July 1909, Louis Blériot piloted the first airplane crossing of the Channel, flying from Calais to Dover.[9]

What the cited sources add

The 793 raid on Lindisfarne is predominantly used as the starting point of Viking history in British schools and colleges today.[8] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 793 describes "the harrowing inroads of heathen men" making "lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island".[8] Operation Cycle was the code name for the evacuation of British and Allied troops from Havre on 10-13 June 1940.[10] Operation Dynamo successfully evacuated 338,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk after the port was kept operational.[11][10]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Busiest shipping lane", guinnessworldrecords.com (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "English Channel". The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2004.; "English Channel", Encyclopædia Britannica (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Schwarzschild, "Sonar mapping suggests that the English Channel was created by two megafloods", Physics Today, September 2007, p. 24–27; Gupta, "Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain", Nature Communications, 2017; Gupta, "Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel", Nature, 2007, p. 342–345; "Catastrophic Flooding Changed the Course of British History", Science Daily, 19 July 2007 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "English Channel channel, Europe" (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Gupta, "Why the rift between Britain and France?", Nature, 18 July 2007, p. 342–345; Schwarzschild, "Sonar mapping suggests that the English Channel was created by two megafloods", Physics Today, September 2007, p. 24–27 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Balter, "DNA recovered from underwater British site may rewrite history of farming in Europe", Science, 26 February 2015; Larson, "How wheat came to Britain", Science, 26 February 2015, p. 945–946 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Nick Attwood MA, "The Holy Island of Lindisfarne – The Viking Attack" (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Nick Attwood MA, "The Holy Island of Lindisfarne – The Viking Attack". facts only, no text reused. lindisfarne.org.uk
  9. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Geoffrey Miller, "The Millstone: Chapter 2" (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  10. "Operation Cycle, the evacuation from Havre, 10-13 June 1940". facts only, no text reused. historyofwar.org
  11. Wikipedia, "English Channel" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Operation Cycle, the evacuation from Havre, 10-13 June 1940"; Operation Aerial, the evacuation from north western France, 15–25 June 1940 . Historyofwar.org. Retrieved on 29 July 2013.; "Fact File: Battle of Britain", BBC (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article English Channel (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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