Well, color me naive, I've never seen a map with the Southern Ocean labelled. Someone's hiding things from us.
Seems like it would be just as big, or bigger than the Arctic Ocean, so why wouldn't it be a major one? Are there any other "oceans" that have been hiding from me? And also, are the noticable boundaries between the oceans, so that you can actually tell in a boat, that you've gone from one to another?Most maps are dismal at showing oceanographic features. I'm quite excited that my new atlas shows some ocean depths. (Ocean atlases are neat - the land is at the edge, and you mostly see water - instead of the other way around!) My favourite map, above my desk at the university, shows the oceanic regions adjacent to Canada, with all sorts of detail. And of course labels - the Labrador Sea, Baffin Bay, Hudson and James Bay, the Finnish Cap, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
In my intro. to phys. ocean. notes (which you guys have forced me to go back to at times!
) we name three major oceans, with Arctic and Antarctic as add-ons. In terms of volume, the rough numbers are Atlantic - 25%, Indian - 25%, Pacific - 50%. The small bit which is the two polar oceans just doesn't amount to much in terms of volume (this is most easily appreciated on a globe where you can admire just how stupendously BIG the Pacific is). (Remember, too, that in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean is a big glob of land - though the same can't be said for the Arctic!)
And you probably could tell in a boat when you've switched oceans, if you had some oceanographic instruments! The changes in temperature and salinity can be relatively "sharp" in a global sense but that may still look pretty gradual to someone on a boat. We
are pretty small, after all.
And nope, no other hidden oceans. Well, you've always known about the Southern Ocean - you've seen it on maps - you just never gave that region a name!
You want to know another neat thing? Strong currents, combined with the turning earth, cause the water level on one side of the current to be higher than on the other side (depends on direction and current speed). It's a neat problem in intro oceanography. We calculated the difference in water level across a current through the Strait of Florida (can't recall the name right now), it's something like 80 cm (about a yard). Wow!
