Seas, Gulf, Bays, Coves, Sounds, and Fjords: When Geographers Go Wild

Why call something an ocean when you can call it a sea? Why call it a sea when you can call it a gulf? Why is Long Island Sound a body of water and not a rock band? If you've ever looked at a map of the world's bodies of water and wondered what anyone was thinking, this week's show is for you.

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Transcript

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Ah, nothing like going to the beach. The sun, the sand, the surf, the smell of a sea. Or is it a bay? Or maybe a gulf? Perhaps a sound? Okay, so there are a lot of different terms for what looks like the same thing. In the Western Hemisphere alone, you got all of them. The Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, Puget Sound, the Chesapeake Bay, and then you add in straits, deltas, fjords, inlets, lagoons, and whatnot. And it just leaves you staring at the water and feeling like you left the iron on back home. So we don't want you to suffer through needless angst on vacations. So we're here to walk you through all of it right now. We choose to go to the moon! The Rum Dugger is a curious 100 billion other galaxies. About 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, and 97% of that is salt water. Fully 162 of the world's 206 countries have direct access to the sea, which gives a lot of people a lot of opportunity to head on down to the beach and just call whatever they see whatever they want. There are five oceans, the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern, and you could technically call everybody of salt water by the name of the nearest ocean. Yeah, yeah, I know. What's the fun in that, right? No, we need the kinds of rules that make the US tax code seem like a game of tag. So let's start with some basics. What is the difference between a sea and an ocean? They're both large, they both contain salt water. Well, the easiest explanation is that oceans are just bigger and deeper and connected to each other. Seas are smaller and are at least partially enclosed by land. The Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea are almost completely surrounded by land. The Caspian Sea is basically a giant saltwater lake. In fact, it's considered the world's largest lake. Now, where oceans or seas get near land is where things can get a little weird. If an ocean is surrounded by land on three sides, it's called a gulf. Or not. It can also be a bay or a sound or a bite or perhaps a cove or maybe a fjord. So as near as we can tell, bays and gulfs are more or less the same, except bays are smaller. What's the cutoff? Nobody knows. What's even smaller than a bay? A cove. Coves are usually sheltered by rock formations and have small inlets. Now, if you look at a map of Seattle, you'll see that it sits neither on a gulf, nor a bay, nor a cove. No, it's on something called Puget Sound. On the other side of the country, the body of water that sits between Long Island and Connecticut is called Long Island Sound. So sounds aren't any noisier than any other body of water. What makes them different from bays and gulfs and whatnot is that you don't have to get out the same way you came in. In the case of Long Island Sound, you can go straight out to the Atlantic Ocean or you can weave your way through the East River into Hudson Bay and then out to the Atlantic. If the way in, if the inlet, is really narrow and long and has steep sides, then you are dealing with something that regular English doesn't have a word for. You'll have to learn exactly one word of Norwegian so that you know what to call a fjord when you see one. That's fjord spelled FJ O R D. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, there are exactly five words that start with FJ, and three of them are fjord, fjords, and fjordic, which is I mean that's just cheating, right? If that narrow inlet connects to two larger bodies of water, we call that a strait. The Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea are connected by the Strait of Gibraltar. The Bering Strait connects the Pacific and Arctic Oceans between Alaska and Siberia. Note for Trivia Night, the shortest distance between two continents is across the Bering Strait, where Asia and North America are separated by less than four miles. The second shortest is between Africa and Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar. So next time you're at the beach, you can just look out at the water and relax. You got this. That's this week's show. Special thanks to Kevin Luce for his ace sound effects. Join us next time, and thanks for listening.