1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Continental Shelf

CONTINENTAL SHELF, the term in physical geography for the submerged platform upon which a continent or island stands in relief. If a coin or medal be partly sunk under water the image and superscription will stand above water and represent a continent with adjacent islands; the sunken part just submerged will represent the continental shelf and the edge of the coin the boundary between it and the surrounding deep, called by Professor H. K. H. Wagner the continental slope. If the lithosphere surface be divided into three parts, namely, the continent heights, the ocean depths, and the transitional area separating them, it will be found that this transitional area is almost bisected by the coast-line, that nearly one-half of it (10,000,000 sq. m.) lies under water less than 100 fathoms deep, and the remainder 12,000,000 sq. m. is under 600 ft. in elevation. There are thus two continuous plain systems, one above water and one under water, and the second of these is called the continental shelf. It represents the area which would be added to the land surface if the sea fell 600 ft. This shelf varies in width. Round Africa—except to the south—and off the western coasts of America it scarcely exists. It is wide under the British Islands and extends as a continuous platform under the North Sea, down the English Channel to the south of France; it unites Australia to New Guinea on the north and to Tasmania on the south, connects the Malay Archipelago along the broad shelf east of China with Japan, unites north-western America with Asia, sweeps in a symmetrical curve outwards from north-eastern America towards Greenland, curving downwards outside Newfoundland and holding Hudson Bay in the centre of a shallow dish. In many places it represents the land planed down by wave action to a plain of marine denudation, where the waves have battered down the cliffs and dragged the material under water. If there were no compensating action in the differential movement of land and sea in the transitional area, the whole of the land would be gradually planed down to a submarine platform, and all the globe would be covered with water. There are, however, periodical warpings of this transitional area by which fresh areas of land are raised above sea-level, and fresh continental coast-lines produced, while the sea tends to sink more deeply into the great ocean basins, so that the continents slowly increase in size. “In many cases it is possible that the continental shelf is the end of a low plain submerged by subsidence; in others a low plain may be an upheaved continental shelf, and probably wave action is only one of the factors at work” (H. R. Mill, Realm of Nature, 1897).