There's a lot of water on our planet.
And it goes by a lot of different names.
Gulfs and arroyos and fjords are all bodies of water.
But each one represents something unique.
So let’s try to understand them.
Let’s start big.
The ocean is the large saltwater body that covers most of the Earth.
Technically, it’s the whole thing, but we often split it into five parts with five different
names.
Sea can mean the same thing as ocean, though it’s more specifically used for a large
inland body of saltwater, like the Caspian Sea.
A bay is a part of an ocean bounded by land on three sides.
A cove is one too, but it usually has a smaller entrance, often in a mountain.
Make a bay bigger, and it’s a gulf.
While a bight is a slighter and smaller indentation.
A fjord is like a bay with a steep entrance, often consisting of mountains.
In Scotland and England, you might hear about a firth.
It’s like a fjord, but can be a broader term for bays as well.
A sound is like a large bay, but often longer and between two sections of land.
Sometimes, people call it a channel or strait if it connects 2 larger bodies of water.
Sometimes, a channel is a bit wider.
Heard of a lagoon?
It’s a shallow body of water separated from a larger body of water.
A barachois is a coastal lagoon and it's split from the ocean by a sand bar.
You’ll hear that word a lot in Eastern Canada.
It fills up at high tide.
A tidal pool shows up at low tide.
A delta is where a river flows into an ocean or lake, or into an estuary, which is separate
from the ocean.
It may be where saltwater and freshwater mix.
But water isn’t all about the ocean.
Let’s go inland.
A lake is usually freshwater contained in land.
But there are a few types.
Loch is a Scottish word for lake, but it’s also an inlet that can connect to the ocean—
that’s what Loch Ness is (no comment on the monster).
A pond is a particularly small lake.
While a mere is a notably shallow one.
Think of a big puddle.
A tarn is determined by its location — you’ll find it on a mountain, usually in a spot that
has been carved out by a glacier.
A kettle lake is similar, but it forms when a melting glacier’s water shapes a mountain.
An Oxbow lakes is special too.
It comes from a river that changed course and left a lake behind.
In Australia, it’s called a billabong.
Can we get a kangaroo?
OK, fine.
A lake is fed by a tributary, which is a kind of river - water that flows from high ground
to low.
A creek is a small stream.
There are lots of other names for it, like kill, rivulet, beck, or ghyll.
A branch of a river used to even be called a sprain.
An arroyo is a Spanish word for a creek that fills in after a heavy rain, and it’s commonly
used in the American Southwest.
It’s called a wadi in Arabic.
Elsewhere it might be called a wash.
A freshet has a few definitions, but usually it fills with water after a heavy snow.
A spring shows up when groundwater flows to the surface.
Sometimes, a lee is a natural spring flowing under the earth.
A geyser is a spring that boils and occasionally bursts up.
The word’s name can be traced back to “geysa,” meaning “to gush.”
And in the desert, coming from groundwater as well, you'll find an oasis — a green
and fertile patch that comes from an isolated lake.
And no, there are no monsters there.
These are just some of the many amazing bodies of water in our world.
Now that you know the names, the next step is easy.
Start exploring them.
So just in case you doubted the true epicness of my journey in a rented kayak down the Potomac
River, these bodies of water are connected.
In the Potomac they have found bull sharks that have actually swum in from other bodies
of water.