Who's Heard of The Southern Ocean!?

Oceania is a term that can be quite ambiguous depending on whether the discussion is political or geographical

Whilst Australia and New Zealand are geographically considered as being part of Oceania, and form the largest individual landmasses therein, they are by no means the largest part in such terms.

Australia, being a tad smaller in area than continental USA forms the largest single land mass, but the total geographic area of Oceania is several times larger than both Australia and the USA combined.

Oceania encompasses most of the islands in the South Pacific. The US state of Hawaii is a part of Oceania geographically, although not so if you are considering it politically, hence the ambiguities of the terminology

The geographic Oceania area stretches from Midway Island in the north to Macquarie Island in the south and from Socorro Island (off the coast of South America) in the East to the Cocos Islands in the West, but excludes Indonesian territories.

Australia and New Zealand are more correctly referred to as Australasia as it has a more exact definition than the more ambiguous meaning of Oceania.

Indeed. However, a dear Aussie friend of mine had never the term 'Oceania' applied to any part of the world, let alone one including Australia and NZ. She did know that Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, and Jordan are collectively referred-to as the Levant. That's something I didn't know. We all learn something new every day.

I've heard the term before, but then, I've enjoyed reading a number of sea stories, like the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian and Joshua Slocum's memoir (he being the first man to sail around the world alone) of his voyage in the late 1800s.

Anyone who has read tales of 'Sailing the Seven Seas' knows their five names. (heh)

Summing all the oceans into one term such as Big Salty Waters would eliminate any geographic location. Saying you have been at the Big Salty Waters would leave open where you have been.

We sure need to distinguish where in the world what body of water is. The analogy to that would be to call all continents and any land surface as the 'Big Lands'. That would be going back to Kindergarden age having just one name for a whole category.

E.g. Food for all that is edible, not distinguishing between vegetables, fruits, meets, fish, poultry. Cooking for all kinds of hot food preparation, frying, baking, broiling, steaming, BBQ'ing, etc. Quite overly simplistic, I find. It leaves no room for refined expressions.

Well it's all The Ocean, those are just the regions and sub-regions........

Then there is the Mediterranean Sea, and the South China Sea. Don't forget the Gulf of Mexico, either.

Let's not get so nit-picky, we end up calling the Mississippi River part of the Atlantic Ocean,

Fire and brimstone penguin preacher, found only on the banks of the Southern Ocean....

Your Honor, I object! Although these little fellows are cute in their cathedral of ice.

Yet another example of mankind's polluting the oceans with our plastic beer rings.

I bet that penguin has more baptisms under his belt than you do. LOL

I have yet to acquire a taste for jokes about Southern Gospel Preachers. It borders on racism, especially in the light of the bombings of the Coptic churches in Egypt last Palm Sunday.

And "fixin' to."

"I'm fixin' to fetch me some grub fer all y'all's breakfast. You younguns stay home an' mind the shore!"

Now, that is what I am talking about. I am fixin' to take a break, and have me some black coffee. (no that is nothing racial.)

funny thing about coffee, when you look at it pouring it is brown, and looking into the cup appears black (unless you added cream).

Not quite so, a lot are found in the Atlantic ocean and sound like donkeys braying.

There are pretty obvious divisions between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, divided by the Americas and by Europe/Asia/Africa. The Arctic, Indian, and Southern Oceans, on the other hand, are delimited by boundaries that are completely arbitrary.

I think we could get along with just the first two, IMHO.

If you ever had to navigate through everything it takes to get to the Indian Ocean or the Arctic Ocean, you might adjust that answer just a wee tad bit, laddy.

They better should attribute the Roaring Forties to the Southern Ocean and make it its boundary. Every ship in the area knows when it enters the whirlpool around Antarctica.

The Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties (Shrieking Sixties not shown). The red line marks typical clipper routes during the Age of Sail.

In the last half-century, the winds on average have intensified and have moved 2 to 5 degrees closer to the south pole.

I've never been in the southern hemisphere, but have been in the Arctic. It's cold and windy and the Coriolis force makes weather happen much faster as you get closer to the pole. Weather fronts arrive days apart in contrast to weeks in the temperate zone.

When you get really close to the pole, you can run around the world in seconds rather than days.

The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and even Arctic (mostly) oceans have rather distinct physically identifiable boundaries.

While there might be good reasons to have the Southern Ocean as a separate body of water from the other four oceans, it's less clear what it's borders are (other than an imaginary line on a globe/map).

We look at the Ocean boundaries as static (excepting for sea ice variations), but if you look at the history of the Tectonic plates and all of the shifting, many of the oceans we see now, are quite different than they were in Geologic History. An ocean does has to have boundaries and those boundaries have moved and merged over millennia.

Is that because the Higher Power has declared it: "You may proceed this far and no further?"

It would be interesting to find that somewhere in Earth's remote past, there was no land found above the waters. I am already pretty clear that virtually every point on the globe has been under the seas at least at some point.

"...but if you look at the history of the Tectonic plates and all of the shifting, many of the oceans we see now, are quite different than they were in Geologic History."

The same can be said of the land masses. Does it really matter since that was back when there were no humans roaming around to need such information. And now as we look back at how the world was divided up long before we were here and find it useful to name those bodies of water and land masses, there's not reason they have to be the same name as they are today.

Tectonics seems to keep the cartographers busy in the long run.

I would consider the Arctic Ocean to be bound by North America and Eurasia.

It pretty much is after you throw in Greenland, Iceland and Scandinavia.

The Southern may or not be an ocean the same way Pluto may or not be a planet.

Minor oceanoid?

You do realize there are people who absolutely will not be able to grasp that concept?

Too bad there are no minor hemorrhoids. (Sorry to use that word, and oppress the sensibilities that may or may not be prevailing on this blog today).

I am for making it its own ocean, it is certainly large enough.

What delineates the Southern ocean from the rest are mainly the winds. The prevailing winds between 40S and 60S are fierce and nearly constant as there are few landmasses to block it in its course around Antarctica, churning the ocean's surface into a bluddy maelstrom. Sailing it is not for weak-hearted. You need balls of steel to sail that region.

The Southern Ocean up close.

That looks like what my brother-in-law used to tell me about tugs navigating around the North Sea platform he worked on. They would literally disappear and re-appear.

That, sir, is what we call heavy seas.

Who says sailing in a storm isn't fun? This bloke is having a great time!

Yes, and both poles are affected similarly but the way some aurora-alert sites talk you'd think only the north polar region displayed auroras lol. Ain't so. (some of these sites are blatantly if unconsciously boreal-centric)

Btw, the polar regions might light up a bit this weekend. The Sun ejected a CME on April 9th. The bulk of it will pass by Earth but may deal Earth's magnetic field a glancing blow. If so, expect magnetic disturbances and auroras. I don't know how far south you are but folks in Tas and south NZ might see some action this weekend.

For the young geographer, various ''scientific'' sources over the years (mainly marine biologists, I s'pose) have claimed that at least one-fifth of the animal life (again, by mass, I s'pose and including humans) on Planet Earth live in the Southern Ocean, mainly in the form of krill.

So then, if it rests under the southern lights, and there be mucho krill in the water, it is the Southern Ocean. (And if the compass and sextant say so).

Not only, but Krill Bill was filmed there on-location.

Krill Bill and the Samurai Sultans?

When I was in grammar school many years ago there was no reference to the Southern Ocean, only the Antarctic Ocean.

In the past twenty or thirty years, however, much of the literature that I read DOES refer to a Southern Ocean, probably the same body of water that was referred to as the Antarctic Ocean.

So to answer the question, I have heard about the Southern Ocean.

In 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization created the fifth and newest world ocean - the Southern Ocean. It always was the Antartic Ocean or Austral Ocean.

The Southern ocean is a myth. I am an Ozzie living in Victoria and near the ocean. As you Northern dwellers know, we are upside down here, so try holding a glass of water upside down without any covering and the water pours out. Well as we are upside down, the water down here has drained from our land and is distributed amongst the upper atmosphere. We are able to walk to any other Southern hemisphere country. Currently, we are pressuring the government to put in some roads so that instead of walking, we might drive.

Yes!! the Southern ocean is a myth.

Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

from Anguished English by Richard Lederer.

...grinding teeth now. That is almost insurmountably rotten.

Don't worry about, " for whatever reason " . That's one of the nice things, you never stop learning everyday. Your daughter knows this.