Heather Lewis, age l0, of Peterborough, Ont., Canada, for her question:
How big is the sargasso sea?
Olden sailing ships dreaded this patch of weedy water in the North Atlantic Ocean. Many tales were told of ships strangled in its masses of floating seaweed most of them were untrue. But modern science has proved that the Sargasso sea is a very strange and amazing place.
There are no shores to mark its edges and the nearest land is miles away. It is a big, oval shaped sea within the North Atlantic Ocean and its boundaries are swift¬ flowing ocean currents. These wide rivers in the sea sweep in a never ending circle around and around the North Atlantic. The waters of the Sargasso sea are trapped inside an oval shaped ring of eddying ocean currents. One section of the swirling eddy is the famous Gulf stream.
The circle begins just north of the equator and sweeps westward toward the shores of Florida. There it turns and flows north toward Newfoundland. Then it turns again and flows eastward all the way across the North Atlantic. Off the shores of Europe the great river bends southward and rejoins the current near the equator.
In some places the swirling river in the sea is l0 miles wide, in some places it is l00 miles wide. Let's trace the inside edge of the big oval on a map that shows the North Atlantic.
Find the criss cross lines of latitude and longitude and get ready to mark the inside edge of the ocean current, which is the outside edge of the Sargasso sea. search the sea off the bump of Africa and find where latitude 20 crosses longitude 35. Trace latitude 20 westward to where it crosses longitude 75 near the WeBt Indies. Turn northward up longitude 75 to where it crosses latitude 40 and turn eastward along this line all the way back to longitude 35. Now turn south and meet the spot where you started. Inside this long boundary of swirling currents lies the Sargasso sea.
Its clear blue water reaches down three miles. Its surface covers an area of roughly two million square miles. This is not so hard to imagine when you think that the sargasso sea is a little more than half the size of Canada.
The storms and wild waves tend to rip around this sea in the ocean. Its waters are calm and extra warm and saltier than the rest of the ocean. Patches of tangled sagassum seaweed drift here and there, and the floating islands provide home for throngs of little sea dwellers. Some of the weeds drift in long narrow streamers and some i.s big as an acre. But none of the tanglea are big enough or thick enough to strangle a ship or even to stop it.