Curated playlist
Seas of Asia
- Red SeaThe Red Sea sits between Africa and Asia, a narrow corridor of water that carries roughly 12 percent of all global trade. Ships pass through it every day, threading between continents, and yet the sea they cross is one of the warmest and…
- Black SeaThe Black Sea holds a secret beneath its surface: below a certain depth, nothing breathes. Over 90% of the deeper water volume is completely anoxic, starved of oxygen, and it has been that way for a very long time. That dead zone is why…
- Kara SeaThe Kara Sea freezes over for all but two months of the year, locking its waters in ice from September to May. On 16th-century maps it carried a Latin name, Oceanus Scythicus, and elsewhere Mare Glaciale, the icy sea. For three centuries…
- East Siberian SeaThe East Siberian Sea sits at the top of the world, a vast stretch of Arctic water pressed between the coast of Siberia to the south and the open Arctic Ocean to the north. Its name was only officially fixed on the 27th of June 1935, by…
- Sea of OkhotskThe Sea of Okhotsk sits at the northwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean, pressed between Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan's island of Hokkaido, and a long ribbon of eastern Siberian coastline. Its name traces back to a…
- Sea of JapanThe Sea of Japan sits in near-total isolation from the Pacific Ocean, enclosed by the Japanese archipelago, the Korean Peninsula, Sakhalin, and the Russian Far East. That enclosure shapes almost everything about it: the salinity is lower…
- Laptev SeaThe Laptev Sea sits at the northern edge of Siberia, frozen for most of the year and clear of ice for perhaps two months out of twelve. Temperatures here drop as low as -50 degrees Celsius, and in the north, the sun disappears entirely for…
- Aegean SeaThe Aegean Sea sits between two continents, a body of water roughly 215,000 square kilometres in area that has shaped the course of Western civilization. It is the sea where the Minoan palace of Knossos rose to dominate Bronze Age trade,…
- Chukchi SeaThe Chukchi Sea sits at the top of the world, wedged between Russia and Alaska, where the Pacific Ocean finally meets the Arctic. Its southernmost boundary is the Bering Strait, one of the most consequential stretches of water on earth.…
- Mediterranean SeaThe Mediterranean Sea holds about 2,500,000 square kilometers of water, yet that represents only 0.7% of the global ocean surface. It sits almost completely enclosed by land, hemmed in by the Levant to the east, Anatolia and Southern…
- Bering SeaThe Bering Sea sits at the edge of two worlds. It is the body of water that divides the two largest landmasses on Earth: Eurasia and the Americas. On the 18th of December 2018, a meteor the size of a small building exploded above it at an…