Landforms: relief, water and the sea floor
Mountains, plains, rivers and lakes, but also what you cannot see: continental shelves, ridges in the middle of the oceans and trenches more than ten kilometres deep. Click two points on the map to see the profile of the terrain between them.
Relief: GEBCO Compilation Group (2026) GEBCO 2026 Grid. Rivers and lakes: Natural Earth. Map: © Protomaps, © OpenStreetMap.
Elevation profile
Click a point on the map, then a second one: below appears the profile of the terrain (and of the sea floor) along the shortest line between them. Or try an example.
Examples:
Elevations from the GEBCO 2026 grid reduced to one point per arc minute (about 1.8 km): the narrowest peaks and trenches come out a little lower or shallower than they are. The line follows the great circle, the shortest way on the sphere.
What landforms are
Geomorphology studies the shapes of the Earth's surface: mountains, hills, plains, valleys, coasts, and the waters that shape them. On the map the relief is drawn with shading: the light comes from the north-west, so the slopes in shadow show where the ground rises and where it falls.
The relief under the sea
Darker sea is deeper sea. Along the coasts you can see the shallow continental shelves; the Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs down the middle of the Atlantic, where two plates move apart; around the Pacific there are trenches, where one plate sinks beneath another. The sea-floor data come from the GEBCO grid, which combines measurements made by ships, satellites and other instruments.