The Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of all the oceans on Earth. The name comes from the well-known in ancient Greece myth about Atlanta, a titan holding on its shoulders the celestial vault at the extreme western point of the Mediterranean. It extends in the meridional direction from north to south from the Arctic Ocean to the Southern, Antarctic. In the west, its natural boundary is the coast of America, in the east - the coasts of Europe and Africa. The North Atlantic includes all the seas included in the Atlantic Ocean basin. They have more of it than all other oceans of the earth: the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Lablador Sea, the Sargasso, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean Sea, with its outlying seas - Adriatic, Ionian, Ligurian, Tyrrhenian and Aegean, and Black Sea, Azov and Marble.

The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of all the oceans on Earth

The Atlantic Ocean has an area of 91,665 km2 (according to the geographical atlas of 1982), and the greatest depth is 8742 m. It is a depression - a trough on the ocean floor, near the island of Haiti. It is called the "Puerto Rican trough". A lot of rivers flow into the Atlantic Ocean. Almost four times more than in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Therefore, the waters of the Atlantic are constantly flowing into other oceans, replenishing them and maintaining a common level. But the islands of the Atlantic Ocean is not so much, their total area is less than in other oceans. And this despite the fact that there are such major groups of islands of continental origin as Great Britain, Ireland, Newfoundland, the Great and Lesser Antilles. Also here there are small volcanic islands such as the Azores, St. Helena. There are also coral islands, for example, Bermuda and The Bohemian. The listed islands, of course, not all.

The Atlantic Ocean, perhaps, was the first to attract the attention of researchers and therefore for a long time was considered the most studied. Today, the Arctic and Southern oceans are not inferior to it. But it was from the Atlantic that the real science of the world's oceans began.

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge divides the Atlantic Ocean bed into two almost equal parts. In the western part of the mountainous structures: the Newfoundland Ridge, the Barakuda Ridge, the Cear and the Rio Grande uplifts divide the ocean floor into the basins: Labrador, Newfoundland, North American, Guiana, Brazilian, Argentinean. To the east of the mid-oceanic ridge the bed is divided by the underwater base of the Canary Islands, the rise of the islands of the Green Cape, the Guinean uplift and the Whale Ridge to the basins: Western European, Iberian, North African, Cape Verde, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Angola, Cape.

On the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, all the climatic zones of the planet are represented. For tropical latitudes, insignificant seasonal variations of temperature (mean value - 200 C) and abundant precipitation are characteristic. To the north and south of the tropics there are subtropical belts with more pronounced seasonal (from 100 C in winter to 200 C in summer) and daily temperature fluctuations; The precipitation here falls mainly in the summer. A frequent phenomenon in the subtropical zone is tropical hurricanes. In these monstrous atmospheric vortices, the wind speed reaches several hundred kilometers per hour. The most powerful tropical hurricanes are raging in the Caribbean: for example, in the Gulf of Mexico and the islands of the West Indies.

In the Atlantic Ocean, there are several layers of deep-sea currents. Under the Gulf Stream, there is a powerful countercurrent, the main stream of which lies at a depth of up to 3500 m, at a speed of 20 cm/s. The counterflow is a narrow stream in the lower part of the continental slope, the formation of this current is associated with the bottom runoff of cold waters from the Norwegian and Greenland seas. The subsurface current of Lomonosov was discovered in the equatorial zone of the ocean.

Distribution of the animal world of the Atlantic Ocean has a pronounced zonal character. In subantarctic and Antarctic waters, fish species of notothenia, blue whiting, and others are of commercial importance. Benthos and plankton in the Atlantic are poor in species and biomass. In the subantarctic zone and in the adjacent band of the temperate zone, the biomass reaches its maximum. In zooplankton, copepods, pteropods predominate, in nekton - from mammals whales, pinnipeds, of fish - Notothenia.

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