The Weddell Sea is part of the Southern Ocean. Its land boundaries are defined by the bay formed from the coasts of Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. Much of the southern part of the sea, up to Elephant Island, is permanent ice, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The sea is contained within the two overlapping Antarctic territorial claims of Argentina, (Argentine Antarctica) and Britain (British Antarctic Territory), and also resides partially within the territorial claim of Chile (Antarctic Chilean Territory). At its widest the sea is around 2,000 km across, in area it is around 2.8 million km².
The sea is named after the British sailor James Weddell who entered the sea in 1823 as far as 74° S. It was first widely explored by the Scot William S. Bruce over 1902-04.
It was in this sea that Shackleton's ship, the Endurance was trapped and crushed by ice in 1915.
The ice shelves which used to extend roughly 3900 square-miles over the Weddell Sea have completely disappeared by 2002.
It is believed that the break-up of Gondwana started in the Weddell Sea.
See also
Other pages about Geography of Magallanes and Chilean Antartica Region
-Aguila Islet -Almirantazgo Fjord -Angamos Island -Azopardo River -Bruggen Glacier -Brunswick Peninsula -Cami/Fagnano Lake -Cape Froward -Cape Horn -Cerro Castillo Dynevor -Cerro Chalten -Cerro Torre -Cordillera Darwin -Cordillera Riesco -Cordillera Sarmiento -Cordillera del Paine -Cueva del Milodon Natural Monument -Dawson Island -Del Toro Lake -Dickson Glacier -Diego Ramirez Islands -Drake Passage -False Cape Horn -Fjord of the Mountains -Greve Lake -Grey Glacier -Grey Lake -Grey River (Chile) -Hardy Peninsula -Hearst Island -Hermite Islands -Hornos Island -Hoste Island -Ildefonso Islands -Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego -Larsen Ice Shelf -Magdalena Island, Magallanes, Chile -Messier Channel -Monte Balmaceda -Mount Darwin (Andes) -Mount Tarn -Murray Channel -Navarino Island -Nordenskjold Lake -Paine River -Patagonia -Pehoe Lake -Picton, Lennox and Nueva -Primera Angostura -Punta Dungeness -Santa Ines -Sarmiento Lake -Serrano River -Southern Patagonian Ice Field -Strait of Magellan -Tierra del Fuego -Ultima Esperanza Sound -Villa Puerto Eden -Weddell Sea -Wellington Island -Wollaston Islands
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Weddell_Sea
