atlantic is to ocean as novel is to
Hello dear friends, In this post on Solsarin we’re mentioning “atlantic is to ocean as novel is to”
There was a time before Atlantic history. 200 million years ago, in the early Jurassic
no waters formed either barriers or bridges among what are now the Americas, Europe and Africa.
These land–masses formed a single supercontinent of Pangea until tectonic shifts gradually pushed them apart.
The movement continues to this day, as the Atlantic basin expands at about the same rate that the Pacific’s contracts: roughly two centimetres a year.
The Atlantic Ocean, at an average of about 4000 kilometres wide and 4 kilometres deep, is not as broad
or profound as the Pacific
the Earth’s largest ocean by far, although its multi-continental shoreline is greater than that of the Pacific and Indian Oceans combined.
1- The Atlantic is now but a suburb of the world ocean.Despite the best efforts of international organizations to demarcate it precisely.
2- the Atlantic is inextricably part of world history, over geological time as well as on a human scale.
There was Atlantic history long before there were Atlantic historians.
There were histories around the Atlantic, along its shores and within its coastal waters.
There were histories in the Atlantic, on its islands and over its open seas.
And there were histories across the Atlantic, beginning with the Norse voyages in the eleventh century and then becoming repeatable
and regular in both directions from the early sixteenth century onwards, long after the Indian and Pacific Oceans had become so widely navigable.
3- For almost five centuries, these memories and experiences comprised the history of many Atlantics — north and south, eastern and western; Amerindian and African;
4- enslaved and free; Spanish and Portuguese;
5- British, French, Dutch, creole and hybrid
6–but not yet a single Atlantic history.
More comprehensively Atlantic histories began to appear in the late nineteenth century;
later, various species of political and geo–political Atlanticism flourished after two world wars,
but it would take until the latter part of the twentieth century for self–identified Atlantic historians to come onto the scene.
Only in the early part of our own century did Atlantic history briefly emerge as a discrete field of study before oceanic history and global history engulfed it once more.
7– In retrospect, Atlantic history appears to have peaked in the early 2000s. ‘We are all Atlantic historians now’,
I provocatively declared in 2002, a notorious line usually quoted without its sceptical codicil:
‘or so it would seem from the explosion of interest in the Atlantic and the Atlantic world as subjects of
study among historians of North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa and western Europe.’
8- Within less than a decade, almost thirty collective volumes on Atlantic history had appeared alongside countless articles, theses and monographs (and not just by historians).
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world’s oceans, with an area of about 106,460,000 km2 (41,100,000 sq mi).
It covers approximately 20 percent of Earth’s surface and about 29 percent of its water surface area.
It is known to separate the “Old World” from the “New World” in the European perception of the World.
The Atlantic Ocean occupies an elongated, S-shaped basin extending longitudinally between Europe
and Africa to the east, and the Americas to the west.
As one component of the interconnected World Ocean, it is connected in the north to the Arctic Ocean,
to the Pacific Ocean in the southwest, the Indian Ocean in the southeast
and the Southern Ocean in the south (other definitions describe the Atlantic as extending southward to Antarctica).
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Etymology
The oldest known mentions of an “Atlantic” sea come from Stesichorus around mid-sixth century BC (Sch. A. R. 1. 211):
Atlantikôi pelágei (Greek: Ἀτλαντικῷ πελάγει; English: ‘the Atlantic sea’; etym. ‘Sea of Atlas’)
and in The Histories of Herodotus around 450 BC (Hdt. 1.202.4):
Atlantis thalassa (Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς θάλασσα; English: ‘Sea of Atlas’ or ‘the Atlantic sea’)
where the name refers to “the sea beyond the pillars of Heracles” which is said to be part of the sea that surrounds all land.
In these uses, the name refers to Atlas, the Titan in Greek mythology
who supported the heavens and who later appeared as a frontispiece in Medieval maps and also lent his name to modern atlases.
On the other hand, to early Greek sailors and in Ancient Greek mythological literature such as the Iliad and the Odyssey
this all-encompassing ocean was instead known as Oceanus, the gigantic river that encircled the world;
in contrast to the enclosed seas well known to the Greeks: the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
In contrast, the term “Atlantic” originally referred specifically to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco
and the sea off the Strait of Gibraltar and the North African coast.
The Greek word thalassa has been reused by scientists for the huge Panthalassa ocean that surrounded the supercontinent Pangaea hundreds of millions of years ago.
The term “Aethiopian Ocean“, derived from Ancient Ethiopia, was applied to the Southern Atlantic as late as the mid-19th century.
During the Age of Discovery, the Atlantic was also known to English cartographers as the Great Western Ocean.
The pond is a term often used by British and American speakers in reference to the Northern Atlantic Ocean, as a form of meiosis, or sarcastic understatement.
It is used mostly when referring to events or circumstances “on this side of the pond” or “on the other side of the pond”
rather than to discuss the ocean itself.
The term dates to 1640, first appearing in print in pamphlet released during the reign of Charles I
and reproduced in 1869 in Nehemiah Wallington’s Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in The Reign of Charles I
Extent and data
The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) defined the limits of the oceans and seas in 1953
and countries, see for example the CIA World Factbook. Correspondingly, the extent and number of oceans and seas vary.
The Atlantic Ocean is bounded on the west by North and South America.
It connects to the Arctic Ocean through the Denmark Strait, Greenland Sea, Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea.
To the east, the boundaries of the ocean proper are Europe: the Strait of Gibraltar
(where it connects with the Mediterranean Sea—one of its marginal seas—and, in turn, the Black Sea,
both of which also touch upon Asia) and Africa.
In the southeast, the Atlantic merges into the Indian Ocean. The 20° East meridian, running south from Cape Agulhas to Antarctica defines its border.
The Atlantic has irregular coasts indented by numerous bays, gulfs and seas.
These include the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Caribbean Sea, Davis Strait, Denmark Strait, part of the Drake
Passage, Gulf of Mexico, Labrador Sea, Mediterranean Sea, North Sea, Norwegian Sea, almost all of the Scotia Sea, and other tributary water bodies.
Including these marginal seas the coast line of the Atlantic measures 111,866 km (69,510 mi) compared to 135,663 km (84,297 mi) for the Pacific.
Including its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers an area of 106,460,000 km2 (41,100,000 sq mi) or 23.5% of the global ocean and has a volume of 310,410,900 km3 (74,471,500 cu mi) or 23.3% of the total volume of the earth’s oceans. Excluding its marginal seas, the Atlantic covers 81,760,000 km2 (31,570,000 sq mi) and has a volume of 305,811,900 km3 (73,368,200 cu mi). The North Atlantic covers 41,490,000 km2 (16,020,000 sq mi) (11.5%) and the South Atlantic 40,270,000 km2 (15,550,000 sq mi) (11.1%). The average depth is 3,646 m (11,962 ft) and the maximum depth, the Milwaukee Deep in the Puerto Rico Trench, is 8,376 m (27,480 ft).
Ocean floor
Continental shelves in the Atlantic are wide off Newfoundland, southernmost South America, and north-eastern Europe. In the western Atlantic carbonate platforms dominate large areas, for example, the Blake Plateau and Bermuda Rise. There are numerous submarine canyons off north-eastern North America, western Europe, and north-western Africa. Some of these canyons extend along the continental rises and farther into the abyssal plains as deep-sea channels.
In 1922 a historic moment in cartography and oceanography occurred. The USS Stewart used a Navy Sonic Depth Finder to draw a continuous map across the bed of the Atlantic. Various shelves along the margins of the continents constitute about 11% of the bottom topography with few deep channels cut across the continental rise.
