These are the findings from nearly forty years of shipboard observations made in the deep Sargasso Sea offshore of the verdant island and surrounding coral reefs of Bermuda.
These are the findings from nearly forty years of shipboard observations made in the deep Sargasso Sea offshore of the verdant island and surrounding coral reefs of Bermuda.
Fortuitously situated in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean subtropical gyre, in the Sargasso Sea, scientific discoveries in this region began more than one hundred and twenty years ago with the founding of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, now known as the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS).
After the end of Second World War, Hank Stommel, a pioneering oceanographer from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, thought Bermuda would make an excellent place from which to mount sustained observations of the deep sea at a site called Hydrostation ‘S’, located approximately 25 km southeast of the island. His quote “If Bermuda did not exist, oceanographers would have invented it!” remains just as relevant today as when he first wrote it. Out in the seemingly infinite sea, far from the sight of land and in the realm of flying fishes, clumps of floating Sargassum weed, and home to pelagic seabirds such as the petrel Cahow––thought extinct for most of the nineteenth century––these observations continue to the present day.
Read more at: Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences
