Peter Meisinger, age 11, of Fond du Lao, Wise., for his question:

How deep is the Bering Strait?

Many icebergs drift down into the North Atlantic. but few of them stray down from the Arctic Ocean into the Northern Pacific. Some people say that this is because the Bering Strait is too shallow to let them pass. This is not likely. What’s more, there are better reasons to explain why the north Pacific is free of drifting icebergs.
On a map, the Bering Sea looks like a puddle between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. But the five Great Lakes of North America could fit inside its area almost ten times. Its bleak waters are studded with islands and in winter its shores are crusted with ice. At its deepest, the shallow sea is about 2,000 fathoms   or 12,000 feet.
The fog shrouded Aleutian Islands loop like a necklace from Alaska to Asia, forming the southern edge of the Bering Sea. Their northern slopes reach up about one mile from the sea bed and their southern slopes plunge two miles down a sheer cliff to the deeper floor of the Pacific. Bering Strait sets the northern boundary which separates the Bering Sea from the Arctic Ocean.
The narrowest part of the strait is between Cape Desnev in Siberia and Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska. Here the water is but 24 fathoms deep   and a fathom is equal to six feet. Here there are two small islands called the Diomedes and between them passes the International Date Line which separates each day of the calendar from the next. The larger Diomede belongs to Russia and only three and a half miles away is the smaller Diomede, which belongs to America.
In winter, polar ice clings to these northern shores and drifts in great chunks through the waters. But in summer a warm, strong wind blows up from the Pacific Ocean.
Wild currents of warmer water twist through and among the Aleutians and into the Bering Sea, sweeping the stray ice packs northward into the Arctic. Whalers of the last century waited for this warm wind to sweep the ice north of Bering Strait before they ventured into the polar seas. Slips sailing into the Arctic still take advantage of the warm summer current which sweeps the ice northward from the Bering Sea.
The narrow strait between Asia and America was found by a wandering Russian ship in 1640. In 1725, Peter the Great sent Vitus Bering to make a full survey of the bleak and unfriendly area. In 16 years, the Danish explorer made several vc7agos and suffered many mishaps. But the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait, named in his honor, were not th= roughly explored until Captain James Cook arrived there, fifty years later.