Question: What determines the geometry of the oceans?
About the article "Climate change", section "Plate tectonics".

Candidate passages:
  "Principles Of Geometry" (2005, Tigersushi)  "Lazare" (2007, Tigersushi)  "Burn the Land and Boil the Oceans" (2012, Tigersushi)  
Because the recorded development of geometry spans more than two millennia, it is hardly surprising that perceptions of what constitutes geometry have evolved throughout the ages: 
Over the course of millions of years, the motion of tectonic plates reconfigures global land and ocean areas and generates topography.
This can affect both global and local patterns of climate and atmosphere-ocean circulation.
The position of the continents determines the geometry of the oceans and therefore influences patterns of ocean circulation.
The locations of the seas are important in controlling the transfer of heat and moisture across the globe, and therefore, in determining global climate.
A recent example of tectonic control on ocean circulation is the formation of the Isthmus of Panama about 5 million years ago, which shut off direct mixing between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
This strongly affected the ocean dynamics of what is now the Gulf Stream and may have led to Northern Hemisphere ice cover.
During the Carboniferous period, about 300 to 360 million years ago, plate tectonics may have triggered large-scale storage of carbon and increased glaciation.
Geologic evidence points to a "megamonsoonal" circulation pattern during the time of the supercontinent Pangaea, and climate modeling suggests that the existence of the supercontinent was conducive to the establishment of monsoons.
The size of continents is also important.
Because of the stabilizing effect of the oceans on temperature, yearly temperature variations are generally lower in coastal areas than they are inland.
A larger supercontinent will therefore have more area in which climate is strongly seasonal than will several smaller continents or islands.
Differential geometry has been of increasing importance to mathematical physics due to Einstein's general relativity postulation that the universe is curved.
Contemporary differential geometry is "intrinsic", meaning that the spaces it considers are smooth manifolds whose geometric structure is governed by a Riemannian metric, which determines how distances are measured near each point, and not "a priori" parts of some ambient flat Euclidean space. 
The theme of symmetry in geometry is nearly as old as the science of geometry itself.
Symmetric shapes such as the circle, regular polygons and platonic solids held deep significance for many ancient philosophers and were investigated in detail before the time of Euclid.
Symmetric patterns occur in nature and were artistically rendered in a multitude of forms, including the graphics of M. C. Escher.
Nonetheless, it was not until the second half of 19th century that the unifying role of symmetry in foundations of geometry was recognized.
Felix Klein's Erlangen program proclaimed that, in a very precise sense, symmetry, expressed via the notion of a transformation group, determines what geometry "is".
Symmetry in classical Euclidean geometry is represented by congruences and rigid motions, whereas in projective geometry an analogous role is played by collineations, geometric transformations that take straight lines into straight lines.
However it was in the new geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, Riemann, Clifford and Klein, and Sophus Lie that Klein's idea to 'define a geometry via its symmetry group' proved most influential.
Both discrete and continuous symmetries play prominent roles in geometry, the former in topology and geometric group theory, the latter in Lie theory and Riemannian geometry.
A different type of symmetry is the principle of duality in projective geometry (see Duality (projective geometry)) among other fields.
This meta-phenomenon can roughly be described as follows: in any theorem, exchange "point" with "plane", "join" with "meet", "lies in" with "contains", and you will get an equally true theorem.
A similar and closely related form of duality exists between a vector space and its dual space.