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Ingeography, asound is a smaller body of water usually connected to a sea or an ocean. Asound may be aninlet that is deeper than abight and wider than afjord; or a narrow sea channel or an ocean channel between two land masses, such as astrait; or also alagoon between abarrier island and the mainland.[1][2]
A sound is often formed by the seas flooding ariver valley. This produces a long inlet where the sloping valley hillsides descend to sea-level and continue beneath the water to form a sloping sea floor. These sounds are more appropriately calledrias. TheMarlborough Sounds in New Zealand are examples of this type of formation.
Sometimes a sound is produced by aglacier carving out a valley on a coast then receding, or the sea invading a glacier valley. The glacier produces a sound that often has steep, near vertical sides that extend deep underwater. The sea floor is often flat and deeper at the landward end than the seaward end, due to glacialmoraine deposits. This type of sound is more properly termed afjord (or fiord). The sounds inFiordland, New Zealand, have been formed this way.
A sound generally connotes a protected anchorage. It can be part of most large islands.
In the more general northern European usage, a sound is astrait or the narrowest part of a strait. InScandinavia and around theBaltic Sea, there are more than a hundredstraits namedSund, mostly named for the island they separate from the continent or a larger island.
In contrast,the Sound is the common international[3] short name for Øresund, the narrow stretch of water that separatesDenmark andSweden, and is the main waterway between the Baltic Sea and theNorth Sea. It is also a colloquial short name, among others, forPlymouth Sound,England.
In areas explored by the British in the late 18th century, particularly the northwest coast of North America, the term "sound" was applied to inlets containing large islands, such asHowe Sound inBritish Columbia andPuget Sound in the U.S. state ofWashington. It was also applied to bodies of open water not fully open to the ocean, such asCaamaño Sound orQueen Charlotte Sound in Canada; or broadenings or mergings at the openings of inlets, likeCross Sound in Alaska andFitz Hugh Sound in British Columbia.
Along the east coast andGulf Coast of the United States, a number of bodies of water that separate islands from the mainland are called "sounds".Long Island Sound separatesLong Island from the eastern shores ofthe Bronx,Westchester County, and southernConnecticut. Similarly, inNorth Carolina, a number of largelagoons lie between the mainland and its barrier beaches, theOuter Banks. These includePamlico Sound,Albemarle Sound,Bogue Sound, and several others. TheMississippi Sound separates theGulf of Mexico from the mainland, along much of the gulf coasts ofAlabama andMississippi.
The term sound is derived from theAnglo-Saxon orOld Norse wordsund, which also means "swimming".[2]
The wordsund is also documented inOld Norse andOld English as meaning "gap" (or "narrow access"). This suggests a relation to verbs meaning "to separate", such asabsondern andaussondern (German),söndra (Swedish),sondre (Norwegian), as well as theEnglish verbsin, GermanSünde ("apart from God's law"), and Swedishsynd. English has also the verb "sunder", the adjective "asunder" and the noun "sundry', while Swedish has the adjectivesönder ("broken").
InSwedish and in bothNorwegian languages, "sund" is the general term for any strait. In Danish, Swedish andNynorsk, it is even part of names worldwide, such as in Swedish "Berings sund" and "Gibraltar sund", and in Nynorsk "Beringsundet" and "Gibraltarsundet". In German "Sund" is mainly used for place names in the Baltic Sea, likeFehmarnsund,Strelasund, andStralsund.
Media related toSounds (geography) at Wikimedia Commons
