The world's busiest shipping lane is only 34 kilometres wide
At Dover the English Channel squeezes to about 34 kilometres between England and France, yet along 560 kilometres it funnels more commercial traffic than any other sea lane. Romans called it Oceanus Britannicus; the same water later shielded Britain through Napoleonic and World War threats.
Widths stretch to roughly 240 kilometres at the broadest. It is the smallest of the shallow shelf seas around northwest Europe's continental platform, linking Atlantic waters to the North Sea through the Strait of Dover. English coasts hold denser settlement than French ones; English and French dominate shore speech.
Its names have wandered. Cornish and Breton speakers still say British Sea, Mor Bretennek and Mor Breizh. Anglo-Saxon writers called it the South Sea, and the Narrow Sea survived for a while in English. The word channel, from Old French chanel, entered Middle English in the 13th century; Dutch maps of the 1500s printed Engelse Kanaal, and Shakespeare used Channel in his Henry VI plays. After the 1707 union official maps preferred British Channel for much of a century. French la Manche, the sleeve, goes back at least to the 1600s.
The widest stretch lies near the middle, between Lyme Bay and the Gulf of Saint-Malo. Notable islands include the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands, Crown Dependencies lying off France. The funnel shape magnifies tides from under a metre in the east to more than six metres around the Channel Islands, western Cotentin and northern Brittany at spring tides.
The full link between the North Sea and the Atlantic is geologically young, formed late in the Pleistocene. About 450,000 years ago, during the Anglian glaciation, a flood lasting months poured perhaps a million cubic metres of water per second over a ridge joining Britain to the continent and destroyed it. Later glacial drops in sea level still allowed intermittent land links across the southern North Sea.
Source: English Channel
