Sargasso Sea

The Sargasso Sea is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by four currents, that together form a circulating ocean stream called a gyre. It is the only such oceanic region on Earth to which the term sea has been extended, all others being bound entirely or mostly by land. A distinctive body of water often found with its characteristic brown Sargassum seaweed and often calm blue water, it is very different from the rest of the Atlantic Ocean.

The sea is bounded on the west by the Gulf Stream, on the north by the North Atlantic Current, on the east by the Canary Current, and on the south by the North Atlantic Equatorial Current, a clockwise-circulating system of ocean currents termed the North Atlantic Gyre. It is expansive, stretching from roughly 70 degrees west to 40 degrees west, and from 20 degrees north to 35 degrees north, giving it approximate dimensions of 1,100 km wide by 3,200 km long (700 statute miles wide by 2,000 statute miles long).Bermuda is near the western fringes of the sea.

All the currents deposit the marine plants and refuse they carry into this sea, yet the ocean water in the Sargasso Sea is distinctive for its deep blue color and exceptional clarity, with underwater visibility of up to 61 m (200 ft). It is also a body of water that has captured the public imagination, and so is seen in a wide variety of literary and artistic works and in popular culture.

The naming of the Sargasso Sea after the Sargassum seaweed traces back to the early 15th-century Portuguese explorations of the Azores Islands and of the large "volta do mar" (the North Atlantic gyre), around and west of the archipelago, where the seaweed was often present. However, the sea may have been known to earlier mariners, as a poem by the late 4th-century author Rufus Festus Avienus describes a portion of the Atlantic as being covered with seaweed, citing a now-lost account by the 5th-century BC Carthaginian Himilco the Navigator.

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