Pamela Hill, age 14, of Erie, Penn., for her question:
WHERE IS THE SARGASSO SEA?
Sargasso Sea is the name of an irregular oval shaped area of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is about 2,000 miles west of the Canary Islands and lies roughly between the 20th and 40th parallels of north latitude and between the 35th and 75th meridians west of Greenwich.
No land boundaries of any kind mark off this body of water from the rest of the open ocean. It is set apart only by the presence of marine plants, or seaweed, which float on its surface.
Sargasso Sea is a region of slow ocean currents surrounded by a boundary of rapidly moving currents, such as the Gulf Stream and the North Equatorial Current.
The Sargasso Sea derives its name from sargaco, one of the Portuguese words for seaweed. The word originally meant grape, because the small floats on some seaweeds resemble grapes.
Christopher Columbus is given credit for the first reliable report on this region. He sounded the Sargasso Sea in 1492 to make sure that no rocks lay beneath the weeds.
Early navigators who sailed their small ships to North America saw the Sargasso Sea as patches of gulfweed that seemed to form wide spreading meadows. Soon there were legends and myths about the region which told of large islands of thickly matted seaweed inhabited by huge monsters of the deep.
Poets and novelists used their imaginations in describing the sea. They pictured a blanket of netted seaweed from which no ship could escape, once it became entangled in the weed. They described many of the ghost ships of the past as huddled together in a weaving, rotting mass.
Sargasso Sea is an area of about 2 million square miles. Scientists believe that the first seaweed came from the shores of the West Indies, after it had been torn loose by wind and waves. Parts of it became adapted to living and growing in the open sea.
Many small marine animals have adapted themselves to growing on and among the weeds in the Sargasso Sea. These animals include tiny crabs, shrimps and barnacles. Fish can see at depths as great as 1,200 feet, the deepest fish can see in any ocean.
The greatest quantity of seaweed is found in the central part of the Sargasso Sea. It occurs in scattered masses, some 100 feet in diameter. Wind action forms long strips of the weeds, which follow the general direction of the wind.
Patches of weed may cover more than one acre. But nowhere is the region so thickly covered that the weeds can interfere with the movements of a ship.
Sometimes, unusually strong winds or currents cause some of the weeds to drift into the Gulf Stream and eventually to New England or even Ireland and Norway.
The water of the Sargasso Sea has an unusually deep blue color. Also, the water has a high salt content (3.7 percent), a high temperature (up to 83 degrees Fahrenheit) and is extremely clear. These features result chiefly from the location of the sea and its great depth, averaging over three miles.