EUROPEAN PLAIN

one of the greatest uninterrupted expanses of plain on the Earth's surface. It sweeps from the Pyrenees Mountains on the French-Spanish border across northern Europe to the Ural Mountains in Russia. In western Europe the plain is comparatively narrow, rarely exceeding 200 miles (320 kilometres) in width, but as it stretches eastward it broadens steadily until it reaches its greatest width in western Russia, where it extends more than 2,000 miles. Because it covers so much territory, the plain gives Europe the lowest average elevation of any continent. The flatness of this enormous lowland, however, is broken by hills, particularly in the west. one of the world's largest uninterrupted expanses of plain, stretching from the Pyrenees mountain range on the French-Spanish border across northern Europe to the Ural Mountains in Russia. In western Europe the plain is about 200 miles (320 km) in width and covers all of western and northern France, Belgium, The Netherlands, northern Germany, southern Scandinavia, and almost all of Poland. Eastward from northern France and Belgium it is commonly called the North European Plain. As it sweeps eastward the European Plain broadens until it reaches its greatest width, extending more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean, across Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and Russia. In the east the plain is called the East European, or Russian, Plain. The western part of the European Plain has a maritime climate, with warm summers and cool winters, favourable to agriculture; deciduous and coniferous forests abound. Farther eastward rain falls mostly in the warmer months, and winters become extremely cold in the zone of continental climate. The flatness of this enormous lowland is broken by hills, particularly in the west. The Garonne, Loire, and Seine rivers drain the French section of the plain, and the Schelde River and its affluents drain the Plain of Flanders and low plateaus of central Belgium. Deposits from the Rhine River, the main river of west-central Europe, and the Meuse (Maas) have formed an extensive delta plain in The Netherlands. The Weser, Elbe, Oder, and Vistula rivers farther east form several broadly parallel systems that flow generally northwestward into the North or the Baltic sea. The retreat of the continental glaciers that once covered much of the North European Plain left heaps of glacial material called moraines in their wake across northern Germany, Poland, Belarus, and European Russia. Much of the eastern portion of the plain, everywhere below 1,500 feet (450 m) in elevation, is characterized by semiarid grasslands in the south, hardwood forests and then coniferous forests farther north, and tundra bordering the Arctic Ocean.