Water is essential for all beings to sustain life. This is not surprising, because life on our planet arose from water. More than seventy percent of the surface of our planet is covered with water.
Division into oceans
All the water resources of the planet make up the oceans. Parts of the oceans exist in close relationship with each other. The largest division of water resources is carried out into oceans, of which there are four on Earth: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic. Some geographers are inclined to add the fifth to this list - the South, naming 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 expanses of water has its own components. Oceanic boundaries exist only conditionally. On the one hand, these are the mainland and island parts, and on the other hand, these are the parallels and meridians of the planet.
Etymology of names
For the first time among European navigators, Magellan saw the largest ocean of our planet in the sixteenth century. All the time of his journey these waters were calm, hence the namehe got - Quiet. With the names of the other oceans, everything is clear. Atlantic got its name in honor of the legendary Atlas - the hero of ancient Greek myths, who held the sky on his shoulders in the extreme west of the Mediterranean. All waters to the west received the name of a mythical hero in the seventeenth century. Indian began to be called so too thanks to the ancients, only the Romans. Pliny, even before our era, in his writings named the ocean in honor of the most famous eastern country in those days, but the name became generally accepted only from the sixteenth century, after the first trips around the world. The Russian name "Arctic" was approved only in the twentieth century, because in addition to being located in the north, a constituent part of the ocean is glaciers. While in most Western countries it has been called simply Arctic since the mid-nineteenth century.
Sea of the planet
Sea, bays and straits in the total area of the oceans occupy from fifteen to eighteen percent. The only exception: the Arctic, the area of the constituent parts of which is more than seventy percent. The largest isolated part of the ocean is the seas. They are separated by sections of the mainland, islands or underwater heights, and at the same time they differ in one of the signs from other waters - salinity level, temperatures or currents. Based on the degree of remoteness of the seas from ocean waters, they are marginal (Barents), inland (Mediterranean) and interisland (Philippine). The only exception to the list is the Sargasso Sea,the boundaries of which are determined by the algae of the same name. The Pacific Ocean occupies a vast area. Its area is almost fifty percent of the entire water surface of the planet. Therefore, the parts of the Pacific Ocean are the largest in size, exceeding the area of the smallest - the Arctic - several times.
Bays and their types
Bays are relatively small areas of water space compared to the seas that flow deep into the continents. But they are also integral parts of the concept of "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 washing Canada and Russia. If we classify the components of the oceans according to the greatest distribution, then in quantitative terms, the bays will certainly be in the first place. After all, all bays, fjords, estuaries, lagoons belong to this type.
Even the first European who saw the Pacific Ocean - the Spanish conquistador - called it the South Sea, because the view was only on the bay. There are, of course, huge bays, such as Bengal or Mexico, but most of them are quite small. And if scientists agree that there are about sixty seas on the planet, then there are several orders of magnitude more bays, but it is almost impossible to calculate the exact number. And the largest number of bays are the constituent parts of the Atlantic Ocean.
Straits natural and artificial
Straits are rather narrow parts of the oceans or seas that serve as separatorsfor two land areas, but at the same time connect two bodies of water. Straits are divided by width, depth, depth, and also by the direction of water movement. They are very narrow, such as the Bosporus Strait between the Black and Marmara Seas 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.
Besides straits, there is another rather unique form of connecting water spaces with each other. But it's not part of the ocean. These are artificial channels that humanity builds to speed up the movement of ships. First people connected the rivers, then the seas. And relatively recently, by historical standards, they began to connect the oceans with each other. The most famous are the Suez Canal, which links the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and with them the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as the Panama Canal, which speeds up the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
