Europe is a peninsula projecting NW from the continent of Asia, lying to the west of the Ural Mountains, which run from north to south through Russia. There are four major geological divisions: the NW Highlands extending through Norway and Sweden to the north and west of the British Isles ; the Great Northern European Lowland, extending from Russia westward to Germany , France and Britain ; the various Pre-Cambrian and Palaeozoic massifs, of which the Iberian Massif, Brittany, Corsica and Sardinia extend to the coast; and the Alpine Mountains, including the Alps, Pyrenees, Apennines, Carpathian, and Sierra Nevada in southern Spain (Ager 1980).
Each of these reaches the coast, and influences coastal morphology (Kelletat and Scheffers 2005). The coast is treated in sequence from Norway in the north, round the Baltic and down the Atlantic coast, then through the northern Mediterranean into the western Black Sea, ending with the Sea of Azov .
The NW Mountains were originally formed by the...
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References
Ager DV (1980) The geology of Europe. McGraw-Hill, London
Kelletat D, Scheffers A (2005) Europe, coastal geomorphology. In: Schwartz ML (ed) Encyclopedia of Coastal Science. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 452–462
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(2010). Europe – Editorial Introduction. In: Bird, E.C.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of the World's Coastal Landforms. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8639-7_97
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