The Weddell Sea is part of the Southern Ocean and contains the Weddell Gyre. Its land boundaries are defined by the bay formed from the coasts of Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. The easternmost point is Cape Norvegia at Princess Martha Coast, Queen Maud Land. To the east of Cape Norvegia is the King Haakon VII Sea. Much of the southern part of the sea is covered by a permanent, massive ice shelf field, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The sea is contained within the two overlapping Antarctic territorial claims of Argentine Antarctica, the British Antarctic Territory, and also resides partially within the Antarctic Chilean Territory. At its widest the sea is around 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) across, and its area is around 2.8 million square kilometres (1.1×10^6 sq mi). Various ice shelves, including the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, fringe the Weddell sea. Some of the ice shelves on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which formerly covered roughly 10,000 square kilometres (3,900 sq mi) of the Weddell Sea, had completely disappeared by 2002. The Weddell Sea has been deemed by scientists to have the clearest water of any sea. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, on finding a Secchi disc visible at a depth of 80 metres (260 ft) on 13 October 1986, ascertained that the clarity corresponded to that of distilled water. In his 1950 book The White Continent, historian Thomas R. Henry writes: "The Weddell Sea is, according to the testimony of all who have sailed through its berg-filled waters, the most treacherous and dismal region on Earth. The Ross Sea is relatively peaceful, predictable, and safe." He continues for an entire chapter, relating myths of the green-haired merman sighted in the sea's icy waters, the inability of crews to navigate a path to the coast until 1949, and treacherous "flash freezes" that left ships, such as Ernest Shackleton's Endurance, at the mercy of the ice floes.
Etymology The sea is named after the Scottish sailor James Weddell (1787-1834), who entered the sea in 1823 and originally named it after King George IV; it was renamed in Weddell's honour in 1900. Also in 1823, the American sealing captain Benjamin Morrell claimed to have seen land some 10–12° east of the sea's actual eastern boundary. He called this New South Greenland, but its existence was disproved when the sea was more fully explored in the early 20th century. Morrell got as far south as 74°S; the furthest southern penetration since Weddell but before the modern era was made by William Speirs Bruce in 1903. The Weddell Sea is an important area of deep water mass formation through cabbeling, the main driving force of the thermohaline circulation. Deepwater masses are also formed through cabbeling in the North Atlantic and are caused by differences in temperature and salinity of the water. In the Weddell sea, this is brought about mainly by brine exclusion and wind cooling.
History
In 1823, British sailor James Weddell discovered the Weddell Sea. The Antarctic Sound is named after the expedition ship of Otto Nordenskiöld. The sound that separates the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula from Dundee Island is also referred to as "Iceberg Alley", because of the huge icebergs that are often seen here. Snow Hill, located east of the Antarctic Peninsula is almost completely snow-capped, hence its name. The expedition built a cabin on the island in 1902, where Nordenskiöld and three members of the expedition had to spend two winters after his ship was sunk in 1903. In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, also got trapped and was later crushed by ice in this sea. After 15 months on the pack-ice Shackleton and his men managed to reach Elephant Island and safely returned home. In March 2022, it was announced that the well-preserved wreck of the Endurance had been discovered four miles (6.4 km) from its anticipated location, at a depth of 3,008 metres (9,869 ft).
Geology As with other neighboring parts of Antarctica, the Weddell Sea shares a common geological history with southernmost South America. In southern Patagonia at the onset of the Andean orogeny in the Jurassic extensional tectonics created the Rocas Verdes Basin, a back-arc basin whose surviving southeastward extension forms the Weddell Sea. In the Late Cretaceous the tectonic regime of Rocas Verdes Basin changed leading to its transformation into a compressional foreland basin – the Magallanes Basin – in the Cenozoic. While this happened in South America the Weddell Sea part of the basin escaped compressional tectonics and remained an oceanic basin.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
