Coast & seascapes,  Lens-Artists,  Rivers

Gallery: places shaped by water

September 10, 2026 / 57 Comments

But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone.

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water seems such a soft, malleable element. But our planet is full of examples of its power. It is constantly reshaping the land, wearing away rocks and moving others. Over time, what seems immovable is sculpted, smoothed and reshaped. We can’t see it at work, the changes are too slow, but we can see the results of its work.

For this week’s Lens Artists challenge (which I am coming to late thanks to my weekend away in Trieste) John has asked that we share images where water shapes the scene.

I have chosen to take John’s them literally and look not at the water itself but at what it can do to a landscape. So you may not even see water in some of these shots!

My feature photo was taken at Arnarstapi on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in Iceland. Like several of those below, it shows the power of the sea to break down and shape rock.

Over time the waves crashing against headlands erode the rock. First caves are formed, then when the caves break through to the other side, the formation becomes an arch. Finally, the centre of the arch collapses to form a sea stack. I have examples here of all of these formations.

Caves

Looking out from a cave near Lagos in Portugal at cliffs carved away at their base by the sea; more small caves in the making.

Arches

Durdle Door is a natural limestone arch on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset on the south coast of England. The name Durdle is derived from an old English word ‘thirl’, which means to pierce, bore or drill.

Sea stacks

This is Ruby Beach in the Olympic National Park, Washington State. The coast of the Olympic Peninsula is one of the best places to see and photograph sea stacks. Look at the small figures bottom right for scale.

The work of rivers

So far I have looked at how the sea shapes the rocks along our shores, but rivers shape landscapes too. So above is an image of the Grand Canyon, possibly the best example of what a river can do over time. It’s a scan of an old slide which was taken from Bright Angel Point on the canyon’s North Rim.

Finally, rivers can also shape flat lands. The Okavango Delta in Botswana is formed where the Okavango River empties into the Kalahari Desert. The unique landscape is due to the fact that its waters never reach the sea, evaporating into the desert sands instead.

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