Features
The Southern Ocean lies in the Southern Hemisphere. It has typical depths of between 4,000 and 5,000 m (13,000 to 16,000 ft) over most of its extent with only limited areas of shallow water. The Antarctic continental shelf appears generally narrow and unusually deep, its edge lying at depths up to 800 m (2,600 ft), compared to a global mean of 133 m (436 ft).
Equinox to equinox in line with the sun's seasonal influence, the Antarctic ice pack fluctuates from an average minimum of 2.6 million square km (1.0×106 sq mi) in March to about 18.8 million square km (7.2×106 sq mi) in September, more than a sevenfold increase in area.
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current moves perpetually eastward — chasing and joining itself, and at 21,000 km (13,000 mi) in length — it comprises the world's longest ocean current, transporting 130 million cubic m of water per second (4.6×109 cu ft/s) — 100 times the flow of all the world's rivers.
The Southern Ocean's greatest depth of 7,236 m (23,737 ft) occurs at the southern end of the South Sandwich Trench, at 60°00'S, 024°W.
Read more about this topic: Southern Ocean
Famous quotes containing the word features:
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)