Atlantic Ocean: Milwaukee Deep in the Puerto Rico Trench

Source: http://go.hrw.com

 I've always been fascinated about the ocean. Truthfully, I stopped getting my thighs wet in the Atlantic Ocean (no, I never actually swam in it) at a young age. All it took was a trip to a cinema in Manhattan to see "Jaws" and I decided, then and there, to never go back in the ocean again.

Of course, this fear did little to affect my overall love for the ocean (I just love looking at it versus swimming in it) or my curiosity about it. According to wikipedia.com, the Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest body of water at 41,100,000 square miles, and covering about twenty-percent of the Earth's surface. This body of water is in an S-shaped form that extends between the Americas to the west, and Eurasia and Africa to the east.

Experts say they believe the ocean is a flat surface with "occasional deeps, abyssal plains, trenches, sea mounts, basins, plateaus, canyons, and some guyots." There are hundreds of shelves along those heights that lead to even deeper channels that make up approximately 11 percent of the bottom topography. The deepest point of the Atlantic Ocean sits in the Puerto Rico Trench, which lies in the Northern Atlantic. This section is 500 miles long with a depth of 28,232 feet and is known as the Milwaukee Deep.

Photo/Milwaukee Deep Source: Google

The island of Puerto Rico is to the immediate south of the trench, as is a dangerous fault zone between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. This zone extends west between Cuba and Hispaniola through the Cayman Trench to the coast of Central America. Scientific studies indicate that an earthquake along this particular boundary would prompt a massive tsunami.

Some notable crossing of the Atlantic are the 1942 landing of Christopher Columbus on the island of San Salvador. The sinking of the RMS Titanic during it's maiden voyage on April 15, 1912 after the luxury liner slammed into an iceberg. More than 1,500 lost their lives in the icy Atlantic Ocean that night.

Charles Lindbergh made history with his 1927 solo non-stop transatlantic flight by plane followed by Amelia Earhart's solo flight across the Atlantic five years later in 1932. 

In 1984, in an attempt to prove that Africans may have crossed the Atlantic prior to Columbus, five Argentines sailed from the Canary Islands to Venezuela (a 52-day, 3,000 mile trip) in a 33-foot long raft constructed from tree trunks named "Atlantis."

Guy Delage left Cape Verde headed for Barbados in 1994 to earn his place in history as the first man to reportedly swim across the Atlantic using a kick board. French long distance swimmer, Benoît Lecomte became the first man to swim across the northern Atlantic Ocean without a kick board in 1998. He departed Hyannis, Massachusetts and arrived in Quiberon, Brittany, France in 72 days. Lecomte stopped for 1 week in the Azores, which is 2,400 from the U.S. east coast.

Explorer Victoria Murden McClure spent 82 days at sea, rowing 2,962 miles from the Canary Islands to Guadeloupe to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone by rowboat in 1999. MCClure, who is also the president of Spalding University, was also the first woman to ski to the geographic South Pole.