bottnar

Bottnar is the plural form of the Swedish noun botten, meaning bottom, base, or foundation. It is used in several domains to indicate the lowest or underlying part of something. In everyday Swedish, botten can refer to the bottom of a container, a garment, a vessel, or a landscape feature. In science and geography, bottnar commonly denotes the seabed or lakebed—sjöbottnar or bottnar—characterized by the sediments and organisms living on the bottom and by processes such as deposition and erosion. In geology and geomorphology, bottnar can refer to the lowest sedimentary layer within a basin or the base rock underlying a geological section. In construction and architecture, botten is used to refer to the foundation or base level of a structure; the plural bottnar can arise when discussing multiple foundations or basement levels in different buildings or project sites. The term traces to Old Norse botn, meaning bottom or depth, and is cognate with similar words in Danish and Norwegian. A geographically specific term is Bottenviken, the Gulf of Bothnia, a named body of water whose name derives from its position at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. See also: botten, seabed, foundation.