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The Niagara Falls are voluminous waterfalls  on the Niagara River, straddling the international border between the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York. The falls are 17 miles (27 km) north-northwest of Buffalo, New York and 75 miles (120 km) south-southeast of Toronto, Ontario, between the twin cities of Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York.

Niagara Falls is composed of two major sections separated by Goat Island: Horseshoe Falls, the majority of which lies on the Canadian side of the border, and American Falls on the American side. The smaller Bridal Veil Falls are also located on the American side, separated from the main falls by Luna Island.

A plain is land with relatively low relief, that is flat or gently rolling. Prairies and steppes are types of plains, and the archetype  for a plain is often thought of as a grassland, but plains in their natural state may also be covered in shrublands, woodland  and forest, or vegetation may be absent in the case of sandy or stony plains in hot deserts. Types of flatlands  for which the term is not generally used include those covered entirely and permanently by swamps, marshes, playas, or ice sheets.

Plains occur as lowlands and at the bottoms of valleys but also on plateaus at high elevations. In a valley, a plain is enclosed on two sides but in other cases a plain may be delineated by a complete or partial ring of hills, by mountains or cliffs. Where a geological region contains more than one plain, they may be connected by a pass (sometime termed a gap). Plains may have been formed from flowing lava, deposited by water, ice or wind, or formed by erosion by these agents from hills and mountains.

Plains in many areas are important for agriculture, because where the soils were deposited as sediments they may be deep and fertile, and the flatness facilitates mechanization of crop production; or because they support grasslands which provide good grazing for livestock.

Cracow is the 2nd largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Its historic centre was inscribed on the list of World Heritage Sites as the first of its kind. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Cracow has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural and artistic life and is one of Poland's most important economic centres. It was the capital of Poland from 1038 to 1596; the capital of the Grand Duchy of Kraków from 1846 to 1918; and the capital of Kraków Voivodeship from the 14th century to 1999. It is now the capital of the Lesser Poland Voivodeship.

The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland's second most important city. It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was already being reported as a busy trading center of Slavonic Europe in 965. With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic center.

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, Kraków was turned into the capital of Germany's General Government. The Jewish population of the city was moved into a walled zone known as the Kraków Ghetto, from which they were sent to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Płaszów.

In 1978—the same year UNESCO placed Kraków on the list of World Heritage Sites—Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elevated to the papacy as Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first ever Slavic pope.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Collage_of_views_of_Cracow.PNG]

Zakopane, is a town in southern Poland  with some 28,000 inhabitants (2004), situated in Lesser Poland Province since 1999 (in 1975–98, it was part of Nowy Sącz Province). The town, a place of Góral  culture lies in the southern part of the Podhale region at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, the only alpine mountain range in the Carpathian Mountains.
Zakopane is located in southern Poland near the Slovak border. It can be reached by train or bus from Krakow, which is about two and a half hours away.

Zakopane lies in a large valley between the Tatra Mountains and Gubałówka Hill. It is the most important Polish center of mountaineering and skiing, and is visited annually by some three million tourists. The most important alpine skiing locations are Kasprowy Wierch, Nosal and Gubałówka Hill.

Zakopane has the highest elevation (800-1,000 m) of any town in Poland. The central point of the town is at the junction of Krupówki and Kościuszko Streets.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zakopane_-_skiing_%2828%29.JPG]

Wrocław - is the chief city in south-western Poland, situated on the River Oder (Polish: Odra). Over the centuries the city has been either part of Poland, Bohemia, Austria, Prussia or Germany. Wrocław is the capital of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. According to official population figures for June 2009, its population is 632,240, making it the fourth largest city in Poland.

Ale's Stones (or Ales stenar in Swedish) is a megalithic monument in Scania in southern Sweden. It consists of a stone ship 67 meters long formed by 59 large boulders of sandstone, weighing up to 1.8 tonnes each. According to Scanian folklore, a legendary king called King Ale lies buried there.

The carbon-14 dating system for organic remains has provided seven results at the site. One indicates that the material is around 5,500 years old whereas the remaining six indicate a date about 1,400 years ago. The latter is considered to be the most likely time for Ales Stenar to have been created. That would place its creation towards the end of the Nordic Iron Age.

A meridian (or line of longitude) is an imaginary arc on the Earth's surface from the North Pole to the South Pole that connects all locations running along it with a given longitude. The position of a point on the meridian is given by the latitude. Each meridian is perpendicular to all circles of latitude at the intersection points. Each is also the same size, being half of a great circle on the Earth's surface and therefore measuring 20,003.93 km.

The magnetic meridian is an equivalent imaginary line connecting the magnetic south and north poles and can be taken as the magnetic force lines along the surface of the earth. That is, a compass needle will be parallel to the magnetic meridian. The angle between the magnetic and the true meridian is the Magnetic declination, which is relevant for navigating with a compass.

Rainforests are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions setting minimum normal annual rainfall between 1750–2000 mm (68-78 inches). The monsoon trough, alternately known as the intertropical convergence zone, plays a significant role in creating Earth's tropical rain forests.

40 to 75% of all species on the world's habitats are indigenous to the rainforests. It has been estimated that many millions of species of plants, insects, and microorganisms are still undiscovered. Tropical rainforests have been called the "jewels of the Earth", and the "world's largest pharmacy", because over one quarter of natural medicines have been discovered there. Rainforests are also responsible for 28% of the world's oxygen turn over, often misunderstood as oxygen production, processing it through photosynthesis from carbon dioxide and storing it as carbon through biosequestration.

The undergrowth in a rainforest is restricted in many areas by the lack of sunlight at ground level. This makes it possible to walk through the forest. If the leaf canopy is destroyed or thinned, the ground beneath is soon colonized by a dense, tangled growth of vines, shrubs, and small trees called a jungle. There are two types of rainforest, tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest.

Belavezhskaya Pushcha, (Belarusian: Белавежская пушча) in Belarus and  Puszcza Białowieska  in Poland, is an ancient woodland straddling the border between Belarus and Poland, located 70 km (43 mi) north from Brest (BE). It is one of the last and largest remaining parts of the immense primeval forest which once spread across the European Plain.

This UNESCO World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve lies in parts of the Brest administrative district (Kamianiec and Pruzhany districts, BE) and Hrodna administrative district, BE (Svislach district) in Belarus and on the Poland side near the town of Białowieża in the Podlaskie Voivodeship (62 km (39 mi) south-east of Białystok (PL) and 190 km (120 mi) north-east of Warsaw).

The border between the two countries runs through the forest and is closed for large animals and tourists for the time being. The forest is home to 800 wisent, the continent's heaviest land animals. The security fence keeps the wisent herds physically and genetically separated.

A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet's surface or crust, which allows hot magma, ash  and gases to escape from below the surface. The word volcano is derived from the name of Vulcano island off Sicily which in turn, was named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

Volcanoes are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused by divergent tectonic plates pulling apart; the Pacific Ring of Fire has examples of volcanoes caused by convergent tectonic plates coming together. By contrast, volcanoes are usually not created where two tectonic plates slide past one another. Volcanoes can also form where there is stretching and thinning of the Earth's crust (called "non-hotspot intraplate volcanism"), such as in the African Rift Valley, the Wells Gray-Clearwater volcanic field and the Rio Grande Rift in North America and the European Rhine Graben with its Eifel volcanoes.

Volcanoes can be caused by mantle plumes. These so-called hotspots, for example at Hawaii, can occur far from plate boundaries. Hotspot volcanoes are also found elsewhere in the solar system, especially on rocky planets and moons.

A continent is one of several large landmasses  on Earth. They are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, with seven regions commonly regarded as continents – they are (from largest in size to smallest): Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia.

Plate tectonics is the geological process and study of the movement, collision and division of continents, earlier known as continental drift.

In the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, the term the Continent refers to mainland Europe.

A geographical pole (also geographic pole) is either of the two points—the north pole and the south pole—on the surface of a rotating planet (or other rotating body) where the axis of rotation (or simply "axis") meets the surface of the body. The north geographic pole of a body lies 90 degrees north of the equator, while the south geographic pole lies 90 degrees south of the equator.

It is possible for geographical poles to "wander" slightly relative to the surface of a body due to perturbations in rotation. The Earth's actual physical North Pole and South Pole vary cyclically by a few meters over the span of each few years. This phenomenon is distinct from the precession of the equinoxes of the Earth, in which the angle of the planet (both axis and surface, moving together) varies slowly over tens of thousands of years.

As cartography requires exact and unchanging coordinates, cartographical poles (also cartographic poles) are fixed points on the Earth or another rotating body at the approximate location of the slightly varying geographical poles. These cartographical poles are the points at which the great circles of longitude intersect.

Geographical poles and cartographical poles should not be confused with magnetic poles, which can also exist on a planet or other body.

For the geographical and cartographical poles on Earth, see:

    * North Pole
    * South Pole

For geographical and cartographical poles on astronomical bodies other than Earth, see Poles of astronomical bodies.

In geography, the antipodes  from anti- "opposed" and pous "foot"; pronounced /ænˈtɪpədiːz/) of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal (/ænˈtɪpədəl/) to one another are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth.

In the British Isles, "the Antipodes" is often used to refer to Australia and New Zealand, and occasionally South Africa and Zimbabwe, and "Antipodeans" to their inhabitants. Geographically the antipodes of the British Isles are in the Pacific Ocean, south of New Zealand. This gave rise to the name of the Antipodes Islands of New Zealand, which are close to the antipodes of London at about 50° S 179° E. The antipodes of Australia are in the North Atlantic Ocean, while parts of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are antipodal to New Zealand. The antipodes of South Africa and Zimbabwe are in the North Pacific Ocean, though as Southern Hemisphere ex-British colonies, they are sometimes included as antipodeans in colloquial English.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antipodes_LAEA.png]

Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument  located in the English county of Wiltshire, about 3.2 kilometres (2.0 mi) west of Amesbury  and 13 kilometres (8.1 mi) north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of earthworks surrounding a circular setting of large standing stones. It is at the centre of the most dense complex of Neolithic  and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.

Archaeologists had believed that the iconic stone monument was erected around 2500 BC, as described in the chronology below. One recent theory, however, has suggested that the first stones were not erected until 2400-2200 BC, whilst another suggests that bluestones may have been erected at the site as early as 3000 BC (see phase 1 below). The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. The site and its surroundings were added to the UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites in 1986 in a co-listing with Avebury Henge monument. It is a national legally protected Scheduled Ancient Monument. Stonehenge is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage, while the surrounding land is owned by the National Trust.

Archaeological evidence found by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2008 indicates that Stonehenge served as a burial ground from its earliest beginnings.[5] The dating of cremated remains found on the site indicate burials from as early as 3000 BC, when the initial ditch and bank were first dug. Burials continued at Stonehenge for at least another 500 years.

A waterfall is a place where flowing water rapidly drops in elevation as it flows over a steep region or a cliff. Waterfalls are considered to be one of the most beautiful phenomena in nature. Some waterfalls are used to generate hydro-electric power.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salto_Angel_from_Raton.JPG]

Lake Malta is an artificial lake in Poznań, Poland. It was formed in 1952 as a result of the damming of the Cybina River. It is about 2.2 km long, which makes the lake the biggest man-made lake of the city. The water is 3.1 m deep on average with a maximum about 5 m. There are a number of recreational attractions along the edge of the lake including:

    * an artificial ski slope,
    * an artificial ice rink,
    * a zoological garden,
    * Kolejka Parkowa Maltanka - a narrow gauge railway,
    * the Mound of Freedom,
    * seasonal bikes rental - MaltaBike

The lake also has one the oldest man-made rowing venues in Europe - The Malta Regatta Course. This dates back to 1952 and has held a number of Rowing World Cup events.

The lake also gives its name to the Malta theatre festival, held in Poznań annually in June, with some of the shows taking place next to the lake.

The name of the lake comes from the Knights Hospitaller also known as Knights of Malta. The lake was built on land owned by Church of St. John of Jerusalem Outside the Walls, given to the order in 1187 by duke Mieszko III the Old.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kopiec_Wolno%C5%9Bci_i_Malta-Ski_Pozna%C5%84_RB1.JPG]