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The first Yahoo! Search result for "Sargasso Sea" took us to The Britannica Concise on Yahoo! Reference. We dove into a brief entry about the mysterious, seaweed-dense, elliptically shaped body of still water located in the North Atlantic between the Azores and the West Indies, and described by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Next, we sailed over to the Sargasso Sea category in the Yahoo! Directory to disentangle fact
from fiction and learn a little more about this region named for its surface forest of brown Sargassum seaweed. Warm, very blue (beneath the brownish mat of seaweed), highly salty, and characterized by a slow-moving, clockwise current, the Sargasso Sea is a 2-million-square-mile "floating desert" in the middle of the ocean. It's surrounded by some of the strongest currents on the planet -- including the Florida, the Gulf Stream, and the North Equatorial currents -- and contains within its perimeters the region known as the Bermuda Triangle. You could compare the Sargasso to the eye of a perpetual, slow-motion
hurricane. The Sea of Lost Ships, as it is sometimes called, particularly in older literature and alternative science sources, has a centuries-old history of derelict and disappearing vessels. Although windless calms and weak currents may explain how sailing ships were lost in the Sargasso "doldrums," they do not explain 20th-century phenomena like the 1980 disappearance of the S.S. Poet. However, if you prefer your science straight -- from Cecil Adams' Straight Dope rather than from a speculative
Bermuda Triangle web site -- you too will probably dismiss this maritime legend as "all a lot of hooey." Hooey or not, there are some slippery goings-on in this still uncharted ecosystem. Every year, adult European eels from rivers all over Europe and North Africa return to their Sargasso Sea birthplace to spawn and die. Now that's an event we'd rather not get tangled up in.
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