Each part of the ocean is a piece of a single whole

Water is necessary for all beings to sustain life. This is not surprising, because life on our planet has emerged from the water. Water covers more than seventy percent of the surface of our planet.

Division into the oceans

All the water resources of the planet are the World Ocean. Parts of the World Ocean exist in close relationship with each other. The largest division of water resources is carried out on the oceans, of which there are four on the Earth: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic. Some geographers are inclined to add to this list the fifth - the Southern, calling so the waters that wash the Antarctic. But most insist on only four. And already the seas, bays and straits are part of the ocean. This means that each of the four giant water spaces has its components. The oceanic boundaries exist only conditionally. On the one hand, this is the continental and island part, and on the other - it's parallels and meridians of the planet.

Etymology of names

For the first time from European navigators, Magellan saw the largest ocean of our planet in the sixteenth century. All the time his travels by these waters were calm, so he got the name - Quiet. With the names of the other oceans, everything is clear. Atlantic got its name in honor of the legendary Atlanta - the hero of ancient Greek myths, who kept the sky on his shoulders in the far west of the Mediterranean. All the waters west of the seventeenth century received the name of a mythical hero. The Indian began to be called this way too thanks to the ancient, only the Romans. Pliny even before his era in his works called the ocean in honor of the most famous at that time of the eastern country, but the name was generally accepted only from the sixteenth century, after the first round-the-world travel. The Russian name "Northern Arctic" was approved only in the twentieth century, because apart from the location in the north, the constituent part of the ocean is the glaciers. While in most Western countries it is simply called the Arctic since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The seas of the planet

The seas, bays and straits in the total area of the oceans take from fifteen to eighteen percent. The only exception is the Arctic, the area of constituent parts of which 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 elevations and at the same time they are one of the signs of the remaining waters - the level of salinity, temperatures or currents. Based on the degree of remoteness of the seas from the ocean waters, they are marginal (Barentsevo), internal (Mediterranean), and inter-island (Philippine). The only exception to the list is the Sargasso Sea, whose boundaries determine the algae of the same name. The Pacific Ocean occupies a vast 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 in size the smallest - the Arctic Ocean - several times.

Bays and their types

Bays are relatively small in comparison with the seas, parts of the water space that flow into the interior of the continents. But they are also part of the concept of the "World Ocean". Parts of the World Ocean, which abound in bays, are the expanses of the Atlantic in the region of Europe and the Northern Waters that wash Canada and Russia. If you classify the components of the oceans for the greatest spread, then in quantitative terms, the gulfs will undoubtedly be in the first place. After all, this type includes all the bays, fjords, estuaries, lagoons.

Even the first European who saw the Pacific - the Spanish conquistador - called it the Southern Sea, because the view was only open to the Gulf. There are, of course, huge bays, such as Bengal or Mexican, but most of them are quite small. And if scientists agree that the seas on the planet are about sixty, then the bays are several orders of magnitude larger, but the exact amount is almost impossible to calculate. And the largest number of bays are parts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Straits natural and artificial

The straits are rather narrow parts of the oceans or seas, which serve as dividers for two parts of the land, but at the same time connect the two reservoirs. Straits are divided in width, depth, depth, and also in the direction of water movement. They are very narrow, such as the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, with a width of only seven hundred meters, and very wide, like the Drake Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with a width of more than a thousand kilometers.

In addition to straits, there is another rather unique form of connecting water spaces to each other. But this is not part of the ocean. These are man-made channels that build humanity to accelerate the movement of ships. First people connected rivers, then the seas. And relatively recently, by historical standards, began to connect the oceans. 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, which accelerates the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific.