Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What's a peninsula?
A peninsula (Latin: paeninsula from paene "almost” and insula "island") is a landform surrounded by water on the majority of its border while being connected to a mainland from which it extends.[1][2][3][4] The surrounding water is usually understood to be continuous, though not necessarily named as a single body of water. Peninsulas are not always named as such; one can also be a headland, cape, island promontory, bill, point, or spit.[5] A point is generally considered a tapering piece of land projecting into a body of water that is less prominent than a cape.[6] A river which courses through a very tight meander is also sometimes said to form a "peninsula" within the (almost closed) loop of water. In English, the plural versions of peninsula are peninsulas and, less commonly, peninsulae.
Arnhem Land, including the Gove Peninsula, is home to what is commonly referred to as the didgeridoo and Yolngu are master players and craftsmen of the instrument. In this region, the rhythms, techniques and compositions endemic to the people are of outstanding musical interest. 
The name is derived from "Mashauwomuk", an Algonquian word of uncertain meaning. The first recorded use of "Shawmutt" to describe the peninsula occurs in 1630, by the lone settler William Blackstone, in an invitation to John Winthrop to move the site of Winthrop's colonial settlement to the peninsula from what is now Charlestown. The Charlestown peninsula lacked a source of fresh water, while the Shawmut peninsula had an "excellent spring" on the north side of what is now Beacon Hill.
The island Alameda occupies what was originally a peninsula connected to Oakland. Much of it was low-lying and marshy, but on higher ground than the peninsula and adjacent parts of what is now downtown Oakland were home to one of the largest coastal oak forests in the world. The area was therefore called "Encinal", Spanish for "forest of evergreen oak". "Alameda" is Spanish for "grove of poplar trees" or "tree-lined avenue", and was chosen in 1853 by popular vote.
The peninsula is formed from the northern part of the Great Dividing Range, folded during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago, when Australia collided with what is now parts of South America and New Zealand. The range has experienced significant erosion since. 
Around 40 million years ago, the Indo-Australian tectonic plate began to split apart from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. As it collided with the Pacific Plate on its northward journey, the high mountain ranges of central New Guinea emerged around 5 million years ago. In the lee of this collision zone, the ancient rock formations of what is now Cape York Peninsula remained largely undisturbed.
In prehistoric times, the Italian peninsula was rather different from its current shape. During the last Ice Age, the islands of Elba and Sicily were connected to the mainland. The Adriatic Sea was far smaller, since it started at what is now the Gargano peninsula, and what is now the bay of Venice was a fertile plain with a humid climate.
Dudley Peninsula was first visited by European navigators in 1802 when the British navigator, Matthew Flinders, explored its north coast during March 1802. After meeting Flinders at Encounter Bay in April 1802, the Baudin expedition visited the peninsula's north coast later in April 1802 and explored its south coast during January 1803.
Formal settlement commenced in 1836 with a fleet under the control of the South Australian Company arriving at what is now Kingscote on the western part of Kangaroo Island. Some of the people who had been living on that part of Kangaroo Island prior to 1836 moved to the peninsula to avoid being within the jurisdiction of the South Australian Company and thereby making it "most prosperous part of the island and the scene of its first significant agricultural and pastoral development."
The full extent of Kangaroo Island was gazetted on 13 August 1874 as the cadastral division known as the County of Carnarvon simultaneously with the creation of another cadastral division, the Hundred of Dudley, which covers the full extent of what is now the Dudley Peninsula. In 1875, land in the Hundred of Dudley near the north coast of the peninsula was surveyed and given freehold title in response for the demand for agricultural land.
The town of Penneshaw was proclaimed on 12 January 1882. On 7 June 1888, the local government area of the District Council of Dudley was established. This was subsequently merged in 1996 with the District Council of Kingscote to create the Kangaroo Island Council.
The peoples whom the Romans met at the time of their invasion in what is now known as Spain were the Iberians, inhabiting an area stretching from the northeast part of the Iberian Peninsula through the southeast. The Celts mostly inhabited the inner and north-west part of the peninsula. In the inner part of the peninsula, where both groups were in contact, a mixed culture arose, the Celtiberians. The Celtiberian Wars were fought between the advancing legions of the Roman Republic and the Celtiberian tribes of Hispania Citerior from 181 to 133 BC. The Roman conquest of the peninsula was completed in 19 BC.
The name "Crimea" (for the Crimean Khanate, and later also for the peninsula itself) is derived from the name of the city. It became adopted as an alternative term for what used to be known as "Tauris" or "Tauric Peninsula" in western languages from the 17th century.
When the Michigan Territory was first established in 1805, it included only the Lower Peninsula and the eastern portion of the Upper Peninsula. In 1819, the territory was expanded to include the remainder of the Upper Peninsula, all of what became Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota (previously included in the Indiana and Illinois Territories). When Michigan applied for statehood in the 1830s, the proposal corresponded to the original territorial boundaries. 
Like much of the Massachusetts landscape, the peninsula was shaped by glacial erosion and moraine deposits left by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age. When Europeans arrived, Shawmut was thickly forested. The pre-settlement topography of the peninsula was marked by three hills: Copps Hill, in what is now the North End; Fort Hill, in today's Financial District; and the Trimountain, today's Beacon Hill district. Of the three hills, the Trimountain was by far the largest, a steep-sided mass with three summits. Its name was eventually shortened to Tremont. To the south was a narrow isthmus named Boston Neck that connected the peninsula to the mainland site of Roxbury, now a neighborhood of Boston.
In 1953, a small group of Inuit families were resettled on the Lindstrom Peninsula, and others to Craig Harbour, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police trading post who moved to the Lindstrom Peninsula shortly after their arrival. By the 1960s, they developed a community at what is now the Inuit hamlet of Grise Fiord, to the east.
The first sighting of the Antarctic Peninsula is disputed but apparently occurred in 1820. The most likely first sighting of the Antarctic Peninsula, and also of the whole Antarctic mainland, was probably on 27 January 1820 by an expedition of the Russian Imperial Navy led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. But the party did not recognize as the mainland what they thought was an icefield covered by small hillocks.
A map of recorded Māori archaeological sites for the Otago Conservancy shows many more on the Otago Peninsula than elsewhere in the region. Another showing only those of the Archaic period shows sites clustered on the peninsula and along the coast across the harbour to the west and north. This was one of three more or less distinct clusters on the South Island's south east coast: one from about Oamaru south to Pleasant River; another from Waikouaiti south, which includes the Otago Peninsula and tails off about the Kaikorai estuary; another extending south from the Clutha mouth. The clusters contain a few larger sites. On the Otago Peninsula the one at Little Papanui is of middle size while that at Harwood Township is one of the largest. These and numerous other smaller sites are clearly visible, though often not recognised by visitors for what they are.
"Tiburón" means "shark" in Spanish. Whether Lt. Juan Manuel de Ayala saw a number of sharks near where he anchored the San Carlos in August 1775, off what is now Angel Island, or whether the tree-covered Tiburon Peninsula looked like a shark we may never know. He named the land Punta del Tiburon, or Shark Point. The Coast Miwok Indians had lived here for thousands of years, but there is no clear concept of what they called the peninsula.
The Gove Peninsula () is at the northeastern corner of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. The peninsula became strategically important during World War II when a Royal Australian Air Force base was constructed at what is now Gove Airport.
The Dudley Peninsula came into existence about 9,500 years BP when Kangaroo Island became separate from what is now Fleurieu Peninsula due to the rise in sea level following the end of the last ice age.
The peninsula has a plateau covering its northern half with a maximum height of about while the southern half has a maximum height in the order of a . Its coastline consists of a cliff-line in the order of to in height with the exception of sandy bays such as Nepean Bay in the north-west coast, Antechamber Bay in the north east coast and Pennington Bay on the south-west coast.
The peninsula has a geological basement of Tapanappa Formation sandstones (from the Kanmantoo Group) which were laid during the early Cambrian period. The basement stratum has undergone extensive erosion to create laterite based soil which covers the northern half of the peninsula. The southern half of the peninsula has a Bridgewater Group limestone which was laid over the basement stratum during the Pleistocene and which has eroded to form a dune field.
The "hah-chu-AHBSH" called the peninsula that is now Seward Park "skEba’kst" ("skuh-BAHKST", "nose"); the isthmus was "cqa'lapsEb" ("TSKAH-lap-suhb", "neck"). The isthmus was only a few hundred feet wide and flooded seasonally, turning the peninsula into an island (the lake level was some 9 ft (3m) higher or more). A large wetland and marsh was north of what is now the park entrance circle, at what is now Andrews Bay. The lake, bay, wetlands, and peninsula were richly abundant.
Many of the peninsula's hardwoods were cut down for use in the charcoal-fired iron furnaces operated by the Jackson Iron Company in 1867–1891 at what is now Fayette State Park, on the peninsula's western shore. With its access to Great Lakes shipping, the remaining lumber of the Garden Peninsula was largely logged by the 1890s. However, the area is still home to endemic plants and disjunct populations.
Ambon is located in the Maluku (Moluccas) islands, just south of the much larger island of Seram (Ceram). Ambon has what might be described as a "figure eight" or "hourglass" shape, and consists of two peninsulas separated by a narrow isthmus, with long narrow bays on either side of the isthmus. The key airport at Laha is in the west of the Hitu Peninsula – northern part of the island – facing the Bay of Ambon. The town of Ambon is at the opposite side of the bay, on the southern part of the island, Laitimor Peninsula.
In literature (especially Russian) the term ‘Alaska Peninsula’ was used to denote the entire northwestern protrusion of the North American continent, or all of what is now the state of Alaska, exclusive of its panhandle and islands. The Lake and Peninsula borough, the Alaskan equivalent of a county, is named after the peninsula.
Alternatively, the ancestor of "Oryzomys peninsulae" may have arrived by rafting during the late Miocene, about six million years ago, when the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula was an island located near what is now Nayarit and Jalisco in western Mexico. Some plants and birds from the area may have a similar biogeographic heritage.
The Semporna Peninsula is a peninsula in Sabah, Malaysia. The volcano Bukit Tawau Utara, active as recently as the Holocene. is located on the peninsula at . During the last ice age, the peninsula was connected by an isthmus to the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The former isthmus included what is now the active volcanic island Jolo, located at .
Land-filling had caused the creation of Columbus Park on the peninsula and what was then called “Day Boulevard”, now Morrissey Boulevard, by 1934. There was a huge trash dump on the peninsula which turned into more landfill for other use.
Saanich Peninsula is located north of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. It is bounded by Saanich Inlet on the west, and various straits of the Strait of Georgia on the east, chiefly Haro Strait. The exact southern boundary of what is referred to as the "Saanich Peninsula" (or simply as "the Peninsula") is somewhat fluid in local parlance.