Inside The Bizarre Sea With No Land

Hidden within the North Atlantic Ocean is one of the most bizarre bodies of water in the world. And while it is a named sea, it doesn't actually connect with any coastline or land. Instead, it's filled with layer after layer of brown slime and literally millions of eels. And in fact, it doesn't even stay in one place. Instead, it shifts around depending on the currents. From being a sea where almost no wind blows, thus trapping sailors all throughout history, to being home to one of the largest oceanic garbage patches in the world? Here are 15 unbelievable facts you never knew about the Sargasso Sea. Does a body of water need a coastline in order to be considered its own body of water? Absolutely not. The Sargasso Sea, which sits in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, doesn't touch any land whatsoever. The closest land to it is the tiny island archipelago of Bermuda, but even they are not directly within the sea itself. Instead of land, the Sargasso Sea is hemmed in on all sides by four distinct ocean currents. The Gulf Stream to the northwest, the North Atlantic Current to the northeast, the Canary Current to the southeast, and the Antilles Current to the southwest. This also means that the sea itself is relatively calm and flat, as no current currently runs through it. It is, without a doubt, the weirdest body of water on the entire planet. Speaking of weird, the Sargasso Sea got its name because of one particularly odd inhabitant, Sargassum. This brownish seaweed is found in mass within the Sargasso Sea and can extend for miles in all directions as one continuous brown blob. Now, unlike most seaweeds which are anchored to the seafloor, Sargassum is what we call a holopelagic seaweed, which means that it reproduces in the middle of the ocean and will spend its entire life cycle just floating around the surface of whatever body of water it finds itself in, as it's held up by gas-filled bladders called pneumatocytes. And while the Sargasso Sea is named for Sargassum because it's quite plentiful there, Sargassum can be found in large quantities from Western Africa all the way through the Caribbean Sea. Sargassum isn't the only bizarre creature living in the Sargasso Sea though. Eels, particularly the European and American freshwater eels, are born in the Sargasso Sea. They will then travel to either the east coast of North America or the west coast of Europe to make a life in the various rivers and estuaries. After they've lived a nice, long, river-filled life, they'll make their way back to the Sargasso Sea in order to lay their eggs at the end of their life, thus repeating the process over again. All told, some eels will travel thousands of miles just to return and mate in the Sargasso Sea. It might seem crazy that an ocean can also be a desert, but technically, the Sargasso Sea is one. Because of the four currents that constantly encircle the sea, it forms what we call a gyre, specifically the North Atlantic Gyre. This gyre traps water inside the sea and prevents the mixing of cold and warm waters, which ultimately reduces the overall nutrients of the sea itself. And because there's almost no nutrients available, plankton, one of the core pillars of the food chain, generally avoid the sea entirely. This does a couple of things. The first is that the water of the Sargasso Sea is exceptionally clear and blue. The second is that, just like a land desert will have oases, so does the Sargasso Sea and all of the sargassum floating around. With the sargassum, crabs, fish, shrimp, and even sea turtles are able to thrive and survive in the oceanic desert when they otherwise would not. We don't often expect our geographic regions to move around, but the Sargasso Sea definitely does. You see, despite being a named place on a map, the Sargasso Sea isn't really in a fixed place, nor is it a fixed shape. Because it's bounded on all sides by ocean currents, the very size and shape of the sea shifts when those currents also shift. And while currents generally have their preferred paths, Depending on the time of year and the temperature of the water, they can move and change. All this is to say, we never truly know where the Sargasso Sea is, or even how big it is. All we can say is that it's roughly 700 miles wide by 2,000 miles long, give or take 100 or so miles. Seaweed is usually indicative of one thing, land. Given that most seaweeds anchor themselves to the seafloor, this makes sense. Which means when Columbus first sailed into the Sargasso Sea and he and his men saw thick blankets of sargassum hanging around their boats, they had a mild panic. While land was what they were after, their ultimate fear was that their boats were treading on shallow water, and at any given moment, they could run aground and sink. Little did they know at the time that Sargassum was different, and they were never in any real danger. Well, at least not from the hidden reefs or ground. Being such a bizarre entity, with brown streaks of Sargassum and almost no wind, the Sargasso Sea naturally became a haven for myths and legends. In fact, maritime lore often depicted the sea as something of a graveyard for ships. The theory went that ships would become entangled in disgusting vine-like kelp monsters, which would then pull them down into the ocean. This, of course, wasn't the case at all, as most ships just floated benignly over the sargassum. But that reality didn't stop it from becoming the setting for many famous works of literature, most notably Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and William Hope Hodgson's The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Together, these two works of fiction cemented the Sargasso Sea as a place of mystery and intrigue. Of course, one such legend about the Sargasso Sea did turn out to be true. This region is almost entirely without wind. Unfortunately for would-be sailboats, the Sargasso Sea sits within a region of latitudes we call horse latitudes. When a ship enters the horse latitudes, the wind almost without any warning just dies. And from there, ships will need to slowly paddle or float their way back to where the wind is. These are called the horse latitudes because, according to maritime history, Spanish galleons hauling horses to their colonies in the New World got caught here. And when water and food supplies ran short after many windless weeks floating through the Sargasso Sea, the sailors were forced to throw the horses overboard. It's a grim nickname, but one that definitely lives up to the harrowing stories of getting stuck in this region. The Sargasso Sea is not the Bermuda Triangle. at least not entirely. While the western edge of the Sargasso Sea does overlap with the mythical region of the Bermuda Triangle, most of the Sargasso Sea is completely separate. That said, because of its windless nature, the myths of monsters in the deep, and the unfortunate reputation of ships getting lost within the sea, many of the Bermuda Triangle's ship-based mysteries can likely be attributed to the Sargasso Sea. Of course, all that said, the myth of the Bermuda Triangle is still mostly just that, myth. While many ships and airplanes have disappeared throughout it, as well as throughout the overlapping section of the Sargasso Sea, most can be attributed to human error, natural phenomena, or just plain bad luck. Today, we know definitively that sailing through the Sargasso Sea is perfectly fine, so long as you're not relying on winds, of course. But while sailors have been going back and forth from Europe to North America for centuries now, it would take until 1873 before the legends of the impenetrable seaweed forests would be fully and completely debunked. The HMS Challenger embarked on a worldwide oceanic survey mission in 1872, and one of its first missions was to head right through the heart of the Sargasso Sea to fully and completely document what was there. What they found was Sargassum, and not much else. Having entered the Sargasso Sea sometime in February of 1873, the ship emerged completely unscathed before the end of March of 1873, proving once and for all that the legends of the Sargasso Sea were just that. While we've covered the Sargassum of the Sargasso Sea extensively already, the sea itself is now becoming home to another kind of debris, human garbage. Because of the four currents that surround it and the gyre they create in the middle, the Sargasso Sea has unfortunately become home to one of the world's largest oceanic garbage patches. As garbage is dumped into the ocean all around the North Atlantic, they get picked up by one of the four currents. And as the garbage swings around the currents, most will eventually float into the Sargasso Sea, where it suddenly gets stuck, unable to float out. This means that there's now millions of tons of human-made plastic floating around and mixing with that same sargassum that many oceanic wildlife depends on, which also means that microplastics have made their way into the sea's very delicate food chain. Throughout this entire video, you might have found yourself wondering, who owns the Sargasso Sea? As it turns out, nobody does. Because it's the only sea in the world without a coastline, it exists well beyond the 12 nautical miles of shoreline that countries are allowed to claim as their sovereign territory. This means that the entirety of the Sargasso Sea is considered an area beyond national jurisdiction. Now, there is one small caveat to this designation. Bermuda, which sits just outside the Sargasso Sea's far western edge, does have some rights within the sea, through the United Nations' exclusive economic zone designation. Basically, every country in the world also gets a 200 nautical mile border where they have the rights to fish and other natural resources. So, while Bermuda doesn't technically have sovereignty over this part of the Sargasso Sea, they do own the rights to everything within that zone, which I guess means they get all of the Sargassum seaweed they could possibly want. In 2014, the world did something fairly unique within the Sargasso Sea. They established it as an area where conservation was a priority over everything else. All told, the governments of Bermuda, Azores, Monaco, the United Kingdom, the United States, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Canada, the Cayman Islands, and the Dominican Republic all came together to exercise a stewardship role for the Sargasso Sea and keep its health, productivity, and resilience under continual review. It was a landmark agreement that finally put the legality of maintenance of the Sargasso Sea under some form of regulatory framework, which is great because since it wasn't under the sovereignty of any single country, any country's fishing and natural resource extraction fleet could sail right into the Sargasso Sea and do whatever they wanted with it. While this declaration doesn't necessarily change that, it does at least provide some form of oversight, which is definitely better than nothing. Because of its rich bounty of sargassum, the Sargasso Sea has become something of a gold mine for industrial fishing fleets. Highly sought after species, including tuna, billfish, and mahi-mahi, rely on the Sargassum to hide their young from natural predators, before they migrate back to coastal waters. This means that fishing fleets can regularly sail into the Sargasso Sea and pull out almost as much valuable fish as they can store. Unfortunately, this has had a negative impact on the overall health of these species. As the fishing fleets trawl the Sargasso Sea for fish, they inevitably interfere with those nesting areas within the Sargassum, which then exposes the young to predators or even their own ships, thus wiping out large parts of the species before they even get a chance to mature. Which is why that 2014 agreement is especially important today. The Sargasso Sea isn't just a home for seaweed and fish, it's also the home to something that we all rely on every single day. Cables transmitting all of our data. Criss-crossing the ocean floor of the Sargasso Sea are dozens of large fiber optic cables, connecting the Americas with Europe and Africa. All day, every day, those cables send data back and forth, enabling the interconnected nature of all of our digital lives. As it turns out, because the Sargasso Sea is so relatively calm with no oceanic currents, it made the most sense to deploy the cables here, as the installers could be relatively certain they wouldn't be pushed or pulled too much. The Sargasso Sea is, undoubtedly, one of the weirdest bodies of water on the planet. Home to myths, legends, and, of course, a boatload of seaweed, its very nature as a sea without a coastline makes it truly one-of-a-kind. Hey, go support human-made geography content at our site, thebyte.co. There, you'll get access to all our videos across all our channels with no ads or sponsors, extra and exclusive articles and videos, and of course, you'll be supporting non-AI slop content. A full free month is waiting for you in the link below. I hope you enjoyed learning all about the Sargasso Sea. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about Panama. Thanks for watching, see you next time.