Azovskoye More
An arm of the
Black Sea, connected to that sea's nothern edge by a small inlet.
The Crimea forms the southwest shore.
At the northeasternmost extreme, the
Don River, which drains the entire eastern half of
Ukraine. Another large Ukrainian river, the
Kuban River, empties into the sea a little to the southeast.
The sea is named after the Ukrainian city of
Azov, which lies a little up the Don River from where it empties in.
The Sea of Azov has a maximum depth of 14
m (46
feet), making it the shallowest sea in the world.
This shallowness exacerbates the problems created by the massive amount of
pollution that flows into the Sea from the cities that suround it (among them
Taganrog,
Mariupol,
Yeysk,
and
Berdyansk) and the rivers that flow into it.
Coastal erosion is also a big problem.
If the catastrophic event which hypothetically inundated the Black Sea Basin at the end of the last Ice Age actually happened, the Sea Of Azov would have been formed at that time, flooding an alluvial basin of the Don river.