APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9
Poland can be divided into three main geographic regions crossing the country in roughly parallel zones from east to west. Since geography has played a prominent - if indirect - role in shaping the attitudes and character of Poland's colorful and oftentimes hotheaded people, it is somewhat of a paradox that most of the country owes its surface features to the southward invasions of the Scandinavian ice sheet which began to creep across the North European Plain about 1 million years ago. At its point of greatest advance, this ice sheet covered nearly three-quarters of present-day Poland. With each retreat, the great glaciers left a thick blanket of clays, sands, and gravels - known as drift - spread over the land, eventually completely obliterating the preglacial landscape. At the end of the Ice Age, huge rivers, swollen by melt water from the ice sheet, flowed westward across the middle of Poland creating wide, marshy valleys which are still traceable today and which have facilitated the construction of canals linking Poland's present river systems.
The plains region which makes up the northern two-thirds of Poland bears the strongest traces of this glacial period. It is an area of generally poor soils, of many lakes and marshes, and a number of roughly parallel east-west ridges of glacial drift - called moraines - which in some cases reach more than 650 feet in height. Much of the land is employed for agriculture and forestry, but transport and communications are easy, and a number of cities (particularly Warsaw, Poznan, and the major Baltic ports) have become important industrial centers.
This vast region, from which Poland ("land of fields") derived its name, rises southward into a much narrower central belt consisting of low hills and tablelands of the type found in Upper Silesia. A part of the mineral-rich contact zone between the North European Plain and the European uplands, this area is the economic backbone of modern Poland. Its well-drained loamy soils (the product of fine, windblown deposits from the face of the Scandinavian ice sheet) are the most fertile in Poland and each year produce substantial tonnages of sugar beets, rye, and potatoes. The region's mineral resources include bituminous coal (Silesia's coalfields are among the most important in Europe with reserves exceeded only by those of West
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9
