People cross the Atlantic all the time, but usually they're hurrying to reach the other side. I'm curious about what's in the middle.In a few weeks, I'll be sailing with my family from New York to the mysterious center of the North Atlantic -- the Sargasso Sea. In the picture you see our boat "Moon River" being launched at a boatyard in the Bronx, following a long winter of preparations for our 10,000 mile voyage.
So what's the Sargasso? Egg-shaped and covering about two million square miles of ocean, the Sargasso is the world's only named sea without a coast. It's warmer, clearer, bluer, saltier and calmer than the rest of the Atlantic and fenced in by some of the strongest currents on the planet. Think of it as the eye of an enormous whirlpool.
The idea of a shoreless sea goes against logic. I like that. There are no harbors, no people, no national frontiers or laws in the Sargasso. If you fly over you'd probably see nothing but the same black blue Atlantic, vast and seemingly frozen in waves. But the Sargasso is entirely visible once you get down there in a boat, a sea hiding within an ocean.
Stretching across the calm surface are endless islands of a unique, rootless seaweed. On these strange rafts live teeming colonies of fish and crabs and monstrous creatures camouflaged to blend in with the weed. Scientists call this floating archipelago the rainforest of the ocean.
The Sargasso is difficult to pin down, but here is a map from the 19th century that largely chimes with contemporary estimates. I got it from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration webpage about the Sargasso at http://www.gc.noaa.gov/gcil_mpa_sargasso_sea.html.
Stretching across the calm surface are endless islands of a unique, rootless seaweed. On these strange rafts live teeming colonies of fish and crabs and monstrous creatures camouflaged to blend in with the weed. Scientists call this floating archipelago the rainforest of the ocean.
The Sargasso is difficult to pin down, but here is a map from the 19th century that largely chimes with contemporary estimates. I got it from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration webpage about the Sargasso at http://www.gc.noaa.gov/gcil_mpa_sargasso_sea.html.
In lore, the Sargasso is a sinister place. Christopher Columbus first realized he was lost here. His frightened crew, crossing the Atlantic for the first time, thought the thick weed meant they were about to arrive at land. But they'd only arrived in in the Sargasso, a sort of false continent before the accidental discovery of a real continent.
For centuries after, navigators tried to steer clear. Becalmed and dying of thirst, Spanish sailors would jettison livestock into the Sargasso's crystalline water, giving the area the name Horse Latitudes. Fantasies about vessels becoming enmeshed in malevolent weed eventually morphed into the 20th century myth of the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and ships disappeared without reason.
Those made-up tales were not entirely off the mark. Because of the Sargasso's whirlpool action, this is where plastic and other junk thrown into the Atlantic eventually winds up, hidden from the outside world and trapped for eternity -- a symbol of nature's power and vulnerability. Now, for environmentalists, the ocean rainforest has earned a less happy name: the Atlantic Garbage Patch.
For centuries after, navigators tried to steer clear. Becalmed and dying of thirst, Spanish sailors would jettison livestock into the Sargasso's crystalline water, giving the area the name Horse Latitudes. Fantasies about vessels becoming enmeshed in malevolent weed eventually morphed into the 20th century myth of the Bermuda Triangle, where planes and ships disappeared without reason.
Those made-up tales were not entirely off the mark. Because of the Sargasso's whirlpool action, this is where plastic and other junk thrown into the Atlantic eventually winds up, hidden from the outside world and trapped for eternity -- a symbol of nature's power and vulnerability. Now, for environmentalists, the ocean rainforest has earned a less happy name: the Atlantic Garbage Patch.
Together with my wife Adele and our daughters Zephyr and Looli I'm exchanging the Big Apple for the big blue. Our course will take us for a year around the Sargasso, stopping only at the islands ringing the edge: Bermuda, Azores, Madeira, Canaries, Cape Verde, the Caribbean and Bahamas. In today's hyper-connected world, we're off to see a part of the planet that is literally adrift, a land that time forgot, and so off the grid that its borders change every day.
We're going from this:
To this:
We're going from this:
To this:
And this blog, Voyage to the Sargasso Sea, is where I'll let you know what we discover along the way: about the Sargasso, about the state of the planet -- and ourselves.
