Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Inland sea
Summary
An inland sea (also known as an epeiric sea or an epicontinental sea) is a continental body of water which is very large in area and is either completely surrounded by dry land or connected to an ocean by a river, strait or "arm of the sea". An inland sea will generally have higher salinity than a freshwater lake, but usually lower salinity than seawater. As with other seas, inland seas experience tidality governed by the orbits of the Moon and Sun.
What constitutes an "inland sea" is complex and somewhat necessarily vague. The United States Hydrographic Office defined it as "a body of water nearly or completely surrounded by land, especially if very large or composed of salt water".
Geologic engineers Heinrich Ries and Thomas L. Watson say an inland sea is merely a very large lake. Rydén, Migula, and Andersson and Deborah Sandler of the Environmental Law Institute add that an inland sea is "more or less" cut off from the ocean. It may be semi-enclosed, or connected to the ocean by a strait or "arm of the sea". An inland sea is distinguishable from a bay in that a bay is directly connected to the ocean.
The term "epeiric sea" was coined by Joseph Barrell in 1917. He defined an epeiric sea as a shallow body of water whose bottom is within the wave base (e.g., where bottom sediments are no longer stirred by the wave above). An epeiric sea as one with limited connection to an ocean, and shallow. An inland sea is only an epeiric sea when a continental interior is flooded by marine transgression due to sea level rise or epeirogenic movement.
An epicontinental sea is synonymous with an epeiric sea. The term "epicontinental sea" may also refer to the waters above a continental shelf. This is a legal, not geological, term. Epeiric, epicontinental, and inland seas occur on a continent, not adjacent to it.
The law of the sea does not apply to inland seas.
In modern times, continents stand high, eustatic sea levels are low, and there are few inland seas.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.