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Sargasso Sea

The only sea with no coast, a calm, clear region of the North Atlantic ringed by four currents and strewn with floating Sargassum weed. Columbus feared it, Johannes Schmidt found the spawning ground of the European eel in it in 1921, and Prochlorococcus, the ocean's commonest photosynthetic cell, was discovered there in 1986.

Dated events and their evidence

• 350 CE disputed
  a poem by the 4th-century author Avienius describes a seaweed-covered, windless part of the Atlantic, citing a lost account by the 5th-century BC Carthaginian Himilco; modern scholars consider it unlikely that Himilco reached the Sargasso Sea source
• 1492 CE mainstream
  Christopher Columbus writes of seaweed that he fears will trap his ships and hide shallows, and of a lack of wind source
• 1921 CE mainstream
  on the second Dana expedition Johannes Schmidt locates the spawning grounds of the European eel in the Sargasso Sea, after systematically trawling the Atlantic towards ever smaller larvae; the 1920 to 1922 Dana expeditions settle where the eel breeds source
• 1923 CE mainstream
  Schmidt publishes 'The breeding places of the eel' in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society source
• 1932 CE mainstream
  William Beebe and Otis Barton make their Bathysphere dives off Bermuda with their observations relayed up the phone line and broadcast on national radio source
• 1986 CE mainstream
  Sallie Chisholm, Robert Olson and colleagues discover Prochlorococcus in the Sargasso Sea by flow cytometry; the first culture, strain SS120, is isolated there in 1988 source
• 2010 CE mainstream
  Law and colleagues report 22 years of plankton tows in the North Atlantic: plastic accumulates in the subtropical gyre as ocean circulation predicts, yet its concentration had not increased source
• 2014 CE mainstream
  the Sargasso Sea Commission is established by the governments of the Azores, Bermuda, Monaco, the United Kingdom and the United States to protect the sea source

Where

28.0000° N, 66.0000° W

The point is Wikipedia's position for the Sargasso Sea, 28 N, 66 W, in its western part near Bermuda. The sea has no coasts: it lies roughly between 20 and 35 N and 40 and 70 W inside the North Atlantic Gyre, its edges move with the currents, and a 2011 report centred it on 30 N, 60 W.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargasso_Sea
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Schmidt_(biologist)
• https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192321
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prochlorococcus
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathysphere
• https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1923.0004
• https://doi.org/10.1038/334340a0

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