Cambodia has a land space of 181,035 sq. kilometers within the southwestern a part of the Indochina peninsula, about 20 % of which is used for agriculture. It lies fully inside the tropics with its southern most factors barely greater than 10° above the Equator. The nation capital metropolis is Phnom Penh.
Worldwide borders are shared with Thailand and the Lao Folks’s Democratic Republic on the West and the North, and the Social Republic of Viet Nam on the East and the Southeast. The nation is bounded on the Southeast by the Gulf of Thailand. Compared with neighbors, Cambodia is a geographical contact nation administratively composed of 20 provinces, three of which have comparatively brief maritime boundaries, 2 municipalities, 172 districts, and 1,547 communes. The nation has a shoreline of 435 km and intensive mangrove stands, a few of that are comparatively undisturbed.
The dominant options of the Cambodian panorama are the massive, virtually usually positioned, Tonle Sap (Nice Lake) and the Bassac River Techniques and the Mekong River, which crosses the nation from North to South. Surrounding the Central Plains which lined three quarters of the nation’s space are the extra densely forested and sparsely populated highlands, comprising: the Elephant Mountains and Cardamom Mountain of the southwest and western areas; the Dangrek Mountains of the North adjoining of the Korat Plateau of Thailand; and Rattanakiri Plateau and Chhlong highlands on the east merging with the Central Highlands of Viet Nam.
The Tonle Sap Basin-Mekong Lowlands area consists primarily of plains with elevations usually of lower than 100 meters.
Because the elevation will increase, the terrain turns into extra rolling and dissected.
The Cardamom Mountains within the southwest rise to greater than 1,500 meters and is oriented usually in a northwest-southeast route. The very best mountain in Cambodia –Phnom Aural, at 1.771meters – is within the jap a part of this vary.
The Elephant Vary, an extension of Cardamom Mountains, runs in direction of the south and the southeast and rises to elevations of between 500 and 1,000 meters. These two vary are bordered on the west are slim coastal plain going through the gulf of Thailand that comprises Kampong Som Bay. The Dangrek Mountains on the northern rim of Tonle Sap Basin, consisting of a steep escarpment on the southern fringe of the Korat Plateau in Thailand, marks the boundary between Thailand and Cambodia. The common elevation of about 500 meters with the best factors reaching greater than 700 meters. Between the northern a part of the Cardamom ranges and the western a part of the Dangrek, lies and extension of the Tonle Sap Basin that merges into the plains in Thailand, permitting straightforward accesses from the border of Bangkok.
The Mekong River Cambodia’s largest river, dominates the hydrology of the nation. The river originates in mainland China, flows by means of Myanmar, Laos, Thailand earlier than coming into Cambodia. At Phnom Penh, with different arms, the Bassak River from the south, and the Tonle Sap River linking with the ” Nice Lake ” itself –Tonle Sap – type northwest. It continues additional southeastward to its decrease delta in Viet Nam and to the South China Sea.
The part of Mekong River passing by means of Cambodia lies inside the topical moist and dry zone. It has a pronounced dry season in the course of the Northern Hemisphere winter, with about 80 % of the annual rainfall occurring in the course of the southwest monsoon in Might-October. The Mekong River common annual movement at Kratié of 441 km3 is estimated as 93 % of the full Mekong run-off discharge into the ocean. The discharge at Kratié ranges from a minimal of 1,250m3/s to the utmost 66,700m3/s.
The function of Tonle Sap as a buffer of the Mekong River system floods and the supply of useful dry season flows warrants rationalization. The Mekong River swells with waters in the course of the monsoon reaching a flood discharge of 40,000m3/s at Phnom Penh. By about mid-June, the movement of Mekong and the Bassak River fed by monsoon rains will increase to a degree the place its shops by means of the delta can not deal with the big quantity of water, flooding intensive adjoining floodplains for 4-7 months. At this level, as an alternative of overflowing its backs, its floodwaters reserve the movement of the Tonle Sap River (about 120 km in size), which then has the utmost influx charge of 1.8m/s and enters the Grate Lake, the biggest pure lake in Southeast Asia, growing the scale of the lake from about 2,600 km2 to 10,00 km2 and exceptionally to 13,000 km2 and elevating the water stage by and common 7m on the top of the flooding. This specificity of the Tonle Sap makes it the one “river with return ” on the planet.
After the Mekong’s water crest (when its downstream channels can deal with the quantity of water), the movement reverses and water flows out of the engorged lake. The Nice Lake then acts as a pure flood retention basin. When the floods subside, water begins flowing out of the Nice Lake, reaching a most outflow charge of two.0m/s and, over the dry season, improve mainstream flows by about 16 %, thus serving to to cut back salinity intrusion within the decrease Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. By the point the lake water stage drops to its minimal floor dimension, a band 20-30 km large of inundate forest is left dry with deposits of a brand new layer of sediment. This forest, which is of nice significance for fish, is now vastly shrunk by means of salvation and deforestation. The realm flood round Phnom Penh and right down to the Vietnamese border is about 7,000 km2.
