James Higgins, age 11, of Loudonville, New York, for his question:
What is meant by the Sargasso Sea?
Sooner or later, every young student hears something fantastic about the Sargasso Sea. It is described as a graveyard of ships that became tangled and trapped in vast masses of floating seaweeds. Sea yarns of this type tend to be exaggerated or perhaps pure fantasy. If the fabulous place is not marked on a map, we suspect that it does not exist. Actually the Sargasso Sea does exist but the tales about it are wild legends.
Columbus sailed through the clear, brilliant water of its northern boundaries and sounded the depth of its clear brilliant blue water. But he did not call it the Sargasso Sea. Nor did he realize that this section of the North Atlantic qualified as something special. It merely seemed like a stretch of warm, very calm water with a few carpets of seaweed floating around on its shiny surface.
Later, a Portuguese word for seaweed eras borrowed to name the Sargasso Sea. The region is an east west oval shape, centered about 2,000 miles west of the Canary Islands. If it were five times larger, it would equal the area of North America. The Sargasso Sea is out there in mid ocean far from land, with no coastlines of any sort to mark its boundaries. This may explain why many maps forget to mark it.
Hair raising legends tell of ships and more ships lost in its weedy waters. But actually there is not enough seaweed to bother even a fragile old sailing ship. It is true that masses of weeds drift around but a few of the carpets cover more than an acre. Most of the region is clear open water. The Sargasso Sea is special for other reasons.
It is a huge region of calm water, plumb in the middle of the stormy North Atlantic. This is what makes the Sargasso Sea remarkable and sets it apart as a sea within an ocean. It has boundaries that are even more remarkable. For they are enormous currents that actually travel like mighty rivers through the ocean.
These ocean currents eddy like an enormous whirlpool around the North Atlantic Ocean. This swirling eddy circles around an oval shaped center in mid ocean, where it encloses and protects a region of calm water. This is the Sargasso Sea, where breezes are mild and the sun shines bright. Its water is extra salty, deep vivid blue and the clearest in the world. The ocean floor is more than three miles below the surface.
Right now, marine scientists are studying the unusual ecology of the unusual Sargasso Sea. They are finding some remarkable living creatures in the matted seaweeds. But they do not expect to find any old ghost ships or strangled wrecks from the legendary past.