Cape Cod is a sixty-five-mile peninsula in southeastern Massachusetts, long defined by maritime life, beaches, and tourism, and physically set apart from the mainland by the Cape Cod Canal since the early twentieth century. Named by Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, it is among the oldest English place-names in the United States. Much of the peninsula was formed sixteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago by retreating glacial ice, and its shoreline continues to evolve. With more than four hundred miles of coast, the Cape includes historic towns, fishing communities, scientific institutions at Woods Hole, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, and protected oceanfront in the Cape Cod National Seashore.