Portal:Oceans

The Oceans Portal
A portal dedicated to oceans, seas, oceanography and related topics

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Introduction

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The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as oceans (in descending order by area: the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Antarctic/Southern Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean), and are themselves mostly divided into seas, gulfs and subsequent bodies of water. The ocean contains 97% of Earth's water and is the primary component of Earth's hydrosphere, acting as a huge reservoir of heat for Earth's energy budget, as well as for its carbon cycle and water cycle, forming the basis for climate and weather patterns worldwide. The ocean is essential to life on Earth, harbouring most of Earth's animals and protist life. It originated photosynthesis and therefore Earth's atmospheric oxygen, and still supplies half of it. (Full article...)

A sea is a large body of salt water. The term has two distinct meanings. The first is the interconnected body of seawater that spans most of Earth, known as the sea or the ocean. The second is a named body of water: usually either a marginal sea (a second-order section of the oceanic sea such as the Mediterranean Sea), or a large, nearly landlocked body of water. (Full article...)

Oceanography (from Ancient Greek ὠκεανός (ōkeanós) 'ocean' and γραφή (graphḗ) 'writing'), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. (Full article...)

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The Yellow Sea (simplified Chinese: 黄海; traditional Chinese: 黃海; pinyin: Huáng Hǎi; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄏㄨㄤˊ ㄏㄞˇ; Korean: 황해; Hanja: 黃海; RR: Hwanghae), also known as the North Sea, is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean located between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula, and can be considered the northwestern part of the East China Sea. (Full article...)

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Interesting facts - show different entries

Captain James Young's capture of a Spanish frigate in 1799 (illustrated) brought each of his seamen the equivalent of ten years' pay in prize money.

Observations and samplings from Jasper Seamount show that it is very similar to Hawaiian volcanoes.

The snail species Oxygyrus keraudrenii shows an evolutionary reduction of the gastropod shell for living in open sea.

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Selected list articles and Marine habitat topics

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Tasks

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Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : List of oceanographers, create a comprehensive article on Concentrations of marine debris out of all the gyre and "garbage patch" articles
Copyedit : Draft:Terrance (octopus)
Expand : Coral Sea, Endeavour Strait, Greenland Sea, Solomon Sea
Photo : find images for Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in the oceans
Stubs : Oceanography stub articles, Marine geography stub articles, Aleutian Trench, Bellingshausen Sea, Caernarfon Bay, Gerlache Strait, Gulf of Oman, Iceland Sea, Draft:Terrance (octopus)
Update : Botany Bay, Wilkins Sound, Mariana Trench, Challenger Deep
Verify : Antarctic Circumpolar Current, Bering Sea, Gulf of Aden, Iceberg B-15, Ionian Sea, Japan Trench, Moreton Bay, Sound (geography), Timor Sea
Other : add ISBNs and remove excessive or inappropriate external links from Aral Sea; check La Belle (ship) for GA status; improve citations or footnotes and remove excessive or inappropriate external links from MS Estonia

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General images - show new batch

The following are images from various ocean-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Orca (Orcinus orca) hunting a Weddell seal in the Southern Ocean (from Southern Ocean)
Image 2False color map of ocean depth in the Atlantic basin (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 3The Atlantic Gyres influenced the Portuguese discoveries and trading port routes, here shown in the India Run ("Carreira da Índia"), which would be developed in subsequent years. (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 4Coral reefs of the Maldives (from Indian Ocean)
Image 5Sunset in Monterey County, California, U.S. (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 6Banks of the northwest Atlantic (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 7Thule archaeological site (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 8An adult and sub-adult Minke whale are dragged aboard the Japanese whaling vessel Nisshin Maru. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 9During summer, warm continental masses draw moist air from the Indian Ocean, producing heavy rainfall. The process is reversed during winter, resulting in dry conditions. (from Indian Ocean)
Image 10Universalis Cosmographia, also known as the Waldseemüller map, dated 1507, was the first map to show the Americas separating two distinct oceans. South America was generally considered the New World and shows the name "America" for the first time, after Amerigo Vespucci (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 11Tarawa Atoll in Kiribati (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 12Aldabra giant tortoise from the islands of the Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles (from Indian Ocean)
Image 13Impact of El Niño and La Niña on North America (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 14A female warty squid (Moroteuthis ingens) (from Southern Ocean)
Image 15Typhoon Tip at global peak intensity on 12 October 1979 (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 16Manganese nodule (from Southern Ocean)
Image 17Made in 1529, the Diogo Ribeiro map was the first to show the Pacific at about its proper size (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 18Severe cracks in an ice pier in use for four seasons at McMurdo Station slowed cargo operations in 1983 and proved a safety hazard. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 19Frank Hurley: As time wore on it became more and more evident that the ship was doomed (Endurance trapped in pack ice), National Library of Australia. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 20"Terres Australes" [sic] label without any charted landmass (from Southern Ocean)
Image 21Walruses on Arctic ice floe (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 22Malé's population has increased from 20,000 people in 1987 to more than 220,000 people in 2020. (from Indian Ocean)
Image 23Emanuel Bowen's 1780s map of the Arctic features a "Northern Ocean". (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 24The island geography of the Pacific Ocean Basin (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 25The economically important Silk Road was blocked from Europe by the Ottoman Empire in c. 1453 with the fall of the Byzantine Empire. This spurred exploration, and a new sea route around Africa was found, triggering the Age of Discovery. (from Indian Ocean)
Image 26A Chagossian on Diego Garcia in 1971, before the British expelled the islanders. He spoke a French-based creole language and his ancestors were likely brought as slaves in the 19th century. (from Indian Ocean)
Image 27Pacific Ocean currents have created three islands of debris. (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 28A dhow off the coast of Kenya (from Indian Ocean)
Image 291928 delineation (from Southern Ocean)
Image 30The International Hydrographic Organization's delineation of the "Southern Ocean" has moved steadily southward since the original 1928 edition of its Limits of Oceans and Seas. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 31Capture of Atlantic northwest cod in million tons (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 32James Weddell's second expedition in 1823, depicting the brig Jane and the cutter Beaufroy (from Southern Ocean)
Image 33Portrait of Edmund Halley by Godfrey Kneller (before 1721) (from Southern Ocean)
Image 341911 South Polar Regions exploration map (from Southern Ocean)
Image 35The Kennedy Channel. (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 36Waves in the trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean – areas of converging winds that move along the same track as the prevailing wind – create instabilities in the atmosphere that may lead to the formation of hurricanes.
Image 37The Arctic region showing the Northeast Passage, the Northern Sea Route within it, and the Northwest Passage via Canadian Inland Waters. (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 38Model of a Fijian drua, an example of an Austronesian vessel with a double-canoe (catamaran) hull and a crab claw sail (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 39In 2020, Japanese Prime Minister Suga declined to drink the bottle of Fukushima's treated radioactive water that he was holding, which would otherwise be discharged to the Pacific. (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 40Seas that are parts of the Southern Ocean (from Southern Ocean)
Image 41Fish of the Notothenioidei suborder, such as this young icefish, are mostly restricted to the Antarctic and Subantarctic. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 42Sea cover in the Arctic Ocean, showing the median, 2005 and 2007 coverage (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 43An iceberg being pushed out of a shipping lane by (L to R) USS Burton Island, USS Atka, and USS Glacier near McMurdo Station, Antarctica, 1965 (from Southern Ocean)
Image 44Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) are a keystone species of the food web. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 45Distribution of the major water mass in the Arctic Ocean. The section sketches the different water masses along a vertical section from Bering Strait over the geographic North Pole to Fram Strait. As the stratification is stable, deeper water masses are denser than the layers above. (from Arctic Ocean)
Image 46Map of the Pacific Ocean during European Exploration, circa 1754. (from Pacific Ocean)
Image 47Embarked and disembarked slaves in the Atlantic slave trade 1525–1863 (first and last slave voyages) (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 48The 1564 Typus Orbis Terrarum, a map by Abraham Ortelius, showed the imagined link between the proposed continent of Antarctica and South America. (from Southern Ocean)
Image 49Excavation of the Ertebølle middens in 1880 (from Atlantic Ocean)
Image 50The Aethiopian Ocean depicted in a 1710 French map of Africa (from Atlantic Ocean)

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14 August 2026 –: Thai rescuers find a French tourist and his two sons alive after they spend more than 16 hours at sea when their rented jet ski capsizes off Ko Samui. The family receives medical checks and is discharged. (CBS News)
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