Moving the Waters - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 104

But mighty currents do not make up the whole ocean. Over most
of the ocean, away from the conveyor belt of currents, the waters are
more still. It is time to visit the great oceanic gyres.
Famine and Feast
The Sargasso Sea is a thing of legend. A place where Spanish galleons
could be trapped amid the entangling masses of seaweed, and where
descendants of conquistadores might still do battle with sea mon-
sters. A place that might hide a sunken continent. A place where
nefarious powers might make hideous experiments to threaten
humanity, and where superheroes might retire to regain their fantas-
tic powers. A place used, more seriously, as a metaphor to examine
how people can also become becalmed within the wide ocean of
indifferent humanity, as in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea .
What is the Sargasso Sea in reality? Travel across it, and more often
than not you will see fine weather and a remarkably blue and clear
sea—looking down you can often peer through the water for 50
metres or more. There is a great deal of seaweed there, of the genus
Sargassum , the only seaweed that is adapted to a wholly floating exist-
ence. It provides shelter for everything from eels (migrating from
both North America and Europe) to turtles, to whales and sharks.
These days, the Sargasso Sea is also home to an extraordinary variety
of floating plastic (but more on that development in Chapter 7).
The seaweed, contrary to myth, is never thick enough to trap entire
galleons. Sailing ships could nevertheless become becalmed there, for
the area lies within the 'horse latitudes', those generally high-pressure
areas of blue skies and gentle winds that lie outside the atmospheric
superhighways such as where the trade winds blow. The horse lati-
tudes, by the by, seem to be so termed because seamen of the old
sailing ships were often indebted when they set sail, and so were in
what they called 'dead horse time'; they had often paid off their debts