Bellingshausen_Sea_shaded_and_IHO_proposal

The Bellingshausen Sea is an area along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula between 57°18'W and 102°20'W, west of

Alexander Island Alexander Island, which is also known as Alexander I Island, Alexander I Land, Alexander Land, Alexander I Archipelago, and Zemlja Alexandra I, is the largest island of Antarctica. It lies in the Bellingshausen Sea west of Palmer Land, Antarc ...

, east of

Cape Flying Fish Cape Flying Fish (, also known as Cape Dart) is an ice-covered cape which forms the western extremity of Thurston Island. It was discovered by Richard E. Byrd and members of the US Antarctic Program in a flight from the USS ''Bear'' in Februa ...

Thurston Island Thurston Island is an ice-covered, glacially dissected island, long, wide and in area, lying a short way off the northwest end of Ellsworth Land, Antarctica. It is the third-largest island of Antarctica, after Alexander Island and Berkner Isl ...

, and south of Peter I Island (there the southern ''Vostokkysten''). In the south are, from west to east, Eights Coast,

Bryan Coast Bryan Coast is a portion of the coast of Antarctica along the south shore of the Bellingshausen Sea between Pfrogner Point and the northern tip of the Rydberg Peninsula. To the west is Eights Coast, and to the east is English Coast. The eastern e ...

and

English Coast English Coast is a portion of the coast of Antarctica between the northern tip of Rydberg Peninsula and the Buttress Nunataks, on the west side of Palmer Land. To the west is Bryan Coast, and northward runs Rymill Coast east of Alexander Island ...

(west part) of West Antarctica. To the west of Cape Flying Fish it joins the Amundsen Sea. Bellingshausen Sea has an area of and reaches a maximum depth of . It contains the undersea plain

Bellingshausen Plain Bellingshausen Plain (), also known as Bellinghausen Abyssal Plain, is an undersea plain parallel to the continental rise in the Bellingshausen Sea, named for Admiral Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, commander of the Russian Antarctic Expedition ...

. It takes its name from

Admiral Thaddeus Bellingshausen Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen (russian: Фадде́й Фадде́евич Беллинсга́узен, translit=Faddéy Faddéevich Bellinsgáuzen; – ) was a Russian naval officer, cartographer and explorer, who ultimately ...

, who explored in the area in 1821. In the late

Pliocene Epoch The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58Eltanin asteroid The Eltanin impact is thought to be an asteroid impact in the eastern part of the South Pacific Ocean that occurred around the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary approximately 2.51 ± 0.07 million years ago. The location was at the edge of th ...

(about 1-4 km in diameter) impacted at the edge of the Bellingshausen sea (at the

South Pacific Ocean South is one of the cardinal directions or compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both east and west. Etymology The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Proto-Germanic ''*sunþaz ...

). This is the only known impact in a deep-ocean basin in the world.

References

External links

NASA Bellinghausen Sea satellite photo

Bellinghausen Sea climatological low pressure system
{{coord, 71, S, 85, W, scale:10000000_source:GNIS, display=title Seas of the Southern Ocean Antarctic region