Water is essential for all beings to sustain life. This is not surprising, because life on our planet appeared from the water. Water covers more than seventy percent of the surface of our planet.
Division into oceans
All the planet’s water resources make up the oceans. Parts of the oceans exist in close interconnection with each other. The largest division of water resources is carried out into oceans, of which there are four on Earth: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic. Some geographers tend to add a fifth to this list - the South, calling it the waters washing the Antarctic. But most insist on only four. And now the seas, bays and straits - part of the ocean. This means that each of the four giant water expanses has its own components. Oceanic boundaries exist only conditionally. On the one hand, this is the mainland and island parts, and on the other hand, these are the parallels and meridians of the planet.
Etymology of Names
For the first time among European mariners, the largest ocean of our planet was seen by Magellan in the sixteenth century. All the time of his journey with these waters was calm, therefore he received the name - Quiet. With the names of the other oceans, everything is clear. The Atlantic got its name in honor of the legendary Atlant - a hero of ancient Greek myths who held the sky on his shoulders in the far west of the Mediterranean. All waters located to the west in the seventeenth century received the name of the mythical hero. The Indian began to be called so, too, thanks to the ancient, only the Romans. Pliny, before our era, called the ocean in his works in honor of the most famous eastern country at that time, but the name was generally accepted only from the sixteenth century, after the first voyages around the world. The Russian name “Arctic Arctic” was approved only in the twentieth century, because in addition to its location in the north, a component of the ocean is glaciers. While in most Western countries it is simply called the Arctic since the mid-nineteenth century.
Seas of the planet
Seas, bays and straits in the total area of the oceans occupy from fifteen to eighteen percent. The only exception is the Arctic Ocean, the area of its constituent parts is more than seventy percent. The largest isolated part of the ocean is the sea. They are separated by parts of the mainland, islands or underwater hills, and at the same time they differ in one of the signs from other waters - the level of salinity, temperatures or currents. Based on the degree of remoteness of the seas from ocean waters, they are marginal (Barents), inland (Mediterranean) and inter-island (Philippine). The only exception to the list is the Sargasso Sea, the borders of which are defined by the algae of the same name. The Pacific Ocean occupies a huge space. Its area is almost fifty percent of the entire water surface of the planet. Therefore, parts of the Pacific Ocean are the largest in size, exceeding the smallest in size - the Arctic Arctic - several times.
Gulfs and their types
The bays are relatively small in comparison with the seas plots of water that flow into the interior of the continents. But they are also components of the concept of "oceans." The parts of the oceans that abound in the bays are the expanses of the Atlantic in the region of Europe and the Northern waters washing Canada and Russia. If we classify the components of the oceans according to their greatest distribution, then in quantitative terms the bays will certainly come first. After all, all bays, fjords, estuaries, and lagoons belong to this type.
Even the first European to see the Pacific Ocean - the Spanish conquistador - called it the South Sea, because the view only opened onto the bay. There are, of course, huge bays, such as Bengal or Mexican, but most of them are very small. And if scientists agree that there are about sixty seas on the planet, then there are several orders of magnitude more bays, but the exact number is almost impossible to calculate. And the largest number of bays are the constituent parts of the
Atlantic Ocean.Natural and artificial straits
Straits are rather narrow parts of the oceans or seas that serve as separators for two land areas, but at the same time connect two water bodies. The straits are divided by width, depth, depth, and also in the direction of water movement. They are very narrow, such as the Bosphorus Strait between the Black and Marmara Seas with a width of only seven hundred meters, and very wide, like the Drake Strait between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with a width of more than a thousand kilometers.
In addition to the straits, there is another rather unique form of connecting water spaces with each other. But this is not part of the ocean. These are artificial channels that humanity builds to accelerate the movement of ships. At first, people connected rivers, then seas. And relatively recently, by historical standards, the oceans began to connect. The most famous are the
Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and with them the Atlantic and
Indian Oceans, as well as the
Panama Canal, accelerating the path from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.