Week Two

Week Two (Geography, both physical & human)

Physical Geography

In terms of geography, the US consists of three "blocks"and 50 states. The three geographically distinct blocks are Alaska, at the northwest end of the continent, Hawaii, the island chain in the tropical Pacific, and the so-called "Contiguous Forty-eight", the remaining states, which together make up the familiar more or less rectangular shape between Canada to the north and Mexico to the south (map).

Perhaps the most striking feature, geographically speaking, of the US is its sheer size. The country's surface area is 9.2 million sq km, with Alaska alone occupying some 1.6 million sq km. It is more than 4500km from San Diego, in southern California, to Boston, Massachusetts, and almost 5500km from Seattle, in northwestern Washington, to Miami, at the southermost tip of Florida. Another measure of its size is the fact that there are four time zones between New York and California, and two more to cover Alaska and Hawaii. A map showing the current time in the various time zones can be found here.

Geological structure

The part of the continent occupied by the contiguous forty-eight is anything but uniform. The eastern two-thirds, from the Atlantic to the foothills of the Rockies is on average much lower in altitude than the western third, with vast plains in the interior and the mountains rounded by eons of erosion that are characteristic of geologically old regions (map) (map with labels).

Going from east to west, the main geological features that characterize the contiguous forty-eight are:

in the eastern two-thirds or so of the continent,

the Coastal plain, which reaches approximately from Washington, D.C. to Texas, including all of the coastal areas in between
the Appalachian mountain chain, which stretches from the New England states in the north to northern Georgia in the south
the incalculably huge Mississippi River, with its tributaries, including the Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and so on, that together drain the entire middle of the continent from the Appalachians to the Rockies
the Middle West and Great Plains region, between the Mississippi and the Rockies

in the west third of the continent, much higher, and more rugged, as the geological structures are on the whole younger

the Rocky Mountains
the high deserts, with their spectacular "Western" landscapes, including such well-known features as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in Arizona
the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain chains, that include the highest mountains in the contiguous forty-eight
in California, a range of lower mountains along the coast forms the western side of the central valley.

On this east-to-west geology can be superimposed, as it were, a number of regions, which combine geological and economic and historical features. The main ones are New England, the"Atlantic Megalopolis", the "Heartland", the South (including the Deep South), the Middle West and Great Plains, the Mountain & Desert States, and the Pacific Coast.

Université Jean-Moulin - Lyon 3
Faculté des Langues
Charles C. Hadley 2006-07
This page was last updated on lundi 2 octobre 2006 at 9:21