Waters That Name and Shape Places

The Thames is 346 kilometres long, the longest river entirely in England, and London grew where the Romans could bridge its lowest tidal crossing, so the river and the city share one story.

The Tiber runs about 406 kilometers from the Apennines to the Tyrrhenian Sea, and its lasting fame comes from Rome, founded on its eastern bank.

The Garonne runs 529 kilometers from the Spanish Pyrenees to Bordeaux, where it meets the Dordogne at Bec d'Ambes to form the Gironde estuary.

The Douro is the largest river of the Iberian Peninsula by discharge and reaches the Atlantic at Porto, Portugal's second-largest city.

Despite its name this is a freshwater lake, the lowest on Earth, with a surface between about 209 and 215 meters below sea level, fed mainly by the Jordan River.

Lake Managua is a freshwater lake in Nicaragua about 65 kilometers long, and the capital city of Managua lies on its southwestern shore; its other name, Xolotlan, comes from Nahuatl.

This strait joins the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, between 3.1 and 15 kilometers wide, and takes its name from the harbor city of Kerch; older names include the Cimmerian Bosporus.

An arm of the Southern Ocean off western Antarctica, named for Roald Amundsen by a Norwegian expedition under Captain Nils Larsen in February 1929.

The largest of Antarctica's 675 known subglacial lakes lies beneath Russia's Vostok Station, its surface about 4,000 meters under the ice and roughly 500 meters below sea level.