Canada Essay -- Geography Canada Expository Essays

Canada Canada, is the world's second largest country and it is the largest country in the Western Hemisphere. It comprises all of the North American continent north of the United States, with the exclusion of Alaska, Greenland, and the tiny French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. Its most easterly point is Cape Spear, Newfoundland and its western limit is Mount St. Elias in the Yukon Territory, near the Alaskan border. The southernmost point is Middle Island, in Lake Erie and the northern tip is Cape Columbia, on Ellesmere Island. Canada is bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the west by the pacific Ocean, and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and its associated bodies of water, including Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea. Canada has an abundance of mineral, forest, and water-power resources. The mining industry has been a major force in Canada's economic development in the past and is still the main force in the advance and economic activity and permanent settlement into the northlands. The principal minerals are petroleum, nickel, copper, zinc, iron ore, natural gas, asbestos, molybdenum, sulfur, gold, and platinum; in addition extensive beds of coal, potash, uranium, gypsum, silver, and magnesium are found. Fresh water covers an estimated 756 276 sq km or 7.6% of Canada. The many rivers and lakes supply ample fresh water to meet the nation's needs for its communities and for irrigation, agriculture, industries, transportation, and hydroelectric power generation. Canada has four principal drainage basins: the Atlantic Basin which drains to the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, the Hudson Bay Basin which drains northward into Hudson Bay via the Churchill, Nelson and Saskatchewan rivers, the Arctic Basin which is drained by the Mackenzie River and the Pacific Basin which drains into the Pacific Ocean via the Fraser, Yukon and Columbia rivers. Canada has six major physical, or physiographic, regions: the Canadian Shield, the Arctic Islands, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands, the Appalachian Region, the Interior Plains, and the Cordilleran Region. In simple terms, Canada can be considered a vast, saucer-shaped basin, bordered by mountainous lands on the west, east, and northeast. Hudson Bay and the lowlands along its southern shore form the central depression of this... ... During the last 75 years, the Canadian economy has been transformed from on based primarily on agricultural production and the export of agricultural products and raw materials to one based primarily on its manufacturing and service sectors, as well as a mining sector of continuing importance. Canada's economy reflects an affluent high-tech industrial society and resembles the United States, with whom it has close economic ties. This is one reason why a large percentage of the population live by the U.S.-Canadian border. Another reason is because a large number of the manufacturing plants are located in the southern section of Canada. Canada is rich in natural resources. It is a world leader in value of mineral exports and produces and exports many of the mineral needed for modern industrial economies. It's soils which are especially rich in the three prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, are intensively utilized and make Canada one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural products. Forests cover much of the land, and Canada is the world's largest exporter of newsprint and a leading supplier of lumber, pulp, paper, and wood products.