Separating the Northern France and Southern England lies the English Channel also joining the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about 560 km long and varies in width from 240 km at its widest, to only 34 km in the Strait of Dover. It is the smallest of the shallow seas around the continental shelf of Europe, covering an area of some 75,000 km2. It is believed that the name “English Channel” was from the designation "Engelse Kanaal" in Dutch sea maps from the 16th century onwards. It was also known as the British Sea, and it was called the "Oceanus Britannicus" by the 2nd century geographer Ptolemy. The channel has been a huge advantage for British specially acting as a natural defense blocking many invasions and as a link between cultures of neighbouring countries.
Around 10,000 years ago, before the end of the Devensian glaciations, the British Isles were part of continental Europe. During this period the North Sea and almost all of the British Isles were covered with ice. The sea level was about 120 m lower than it is today, and the channel was an expanse of low-lying tundra, through which passed a river which drained the Rhine and Thames towards the Atlantic to the west. As the ice sheet melted, a large freshwater lake formed in the southern part of what is now the North Sea. As the melt water could still not escape to the north the outflow channel from the lake entered the Atlantic Ocean in the region of Dover and Calais.
Channel’s narrowest point is the Strait of Dover, at it's eastern end and its widest point lies between Lyme Bay and the Gulf of Saint Malo near the midpoint of the waterway. It is relatively shallow, with an average depth of about 120 m (390 ft) at its widest part, reducing to a depth of about 45 m (148 ft) between Dover and Calais. Several major islands are situated in the Channel, the most notable being the Isle of Wight off the English coast and the British Crown Dependencies the Channel Islands off the coast of France. The Isles of Scilly off the far southwest coast of England are not generally counted as being in the Channel. The coastline, particularly on the French shore, is deeply indented; several small islands close to the coastline, including Chausey and Mont Saint-Michel, are within French jurisdiction. The Cotentin Peninsula in France juts out into the Channel, and the Isle of Wight creates a small parallel channel known as the Solent in English waters. The Celtic Sea is to the west of the Channel.
The channel is a recently originated according to geology and it has been dry land for most of the Pleistocene period. It is thought to have been created between 450,000 and 180,000 years ago by two catastrophic glacial lake outburst floods caused by the breaching of the Weald–Artois anticline, a ridge which held back a large proglacial lake in the Doggerland region, now submerged under the North Sea. The flood would have lasted several months, releasing as much as one million cubic metres of water per second. The cause of the breach is not known but may have been caused by an earthquake or simply the build-up of water pressure in the lake. The flood carved a large bedrock-floored valley down the length of the English Channel, leaving behind streamlined islands and longitudinal erosional grooves characteristic of catastrophic mega flood events. It destroyed the isthmus that connected Britain to continental Europe at that time, although a land bridge across the southern North Sea would have existed intermittently at later times after periods of glaciations resulted in lower sea levels.
The Channel is the world's busiest seaways carrying over 500 ships per day. The shore-based long range traffic control system was updated in 2003 and presently, there is a series of Traffic Separation Systems in operation. Though the system is inherently incapable of reaching the levels of safety obtained from aviation systems such as the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, it has reduced accidents to one or two per year. Marine GPS systems allow ships to be preprogrammed to follow navigational channels accurately and automatically, further avoiding risk of running aground, but following the fatal collision between Dutch Aquamarine and Ash in October 2001, Britain's Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) issued a safety bulletin saying it believed that in these most unusual circumstances GPS use had actually contributed to the collision. The ships were maintaining a very precise automated course, one directly behind the other, rather than making use of the full width of the traffic lanes as a human navigator would.
Built in 1994, there is a channel tunnel joining UK and France by rail. Any how, due to being extremely busy, the channel faces many environmental problems. There have been many accidents in the past and it has reduced to two within recent years but these accidents have caused the emission of toxic cargo and oil spills.
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