There is a sea on Earth with no coastline, no beaches, and no borders drawn by land. In this episode of Smartest Year Ever, Gordy explores the strange, misunderstood, and scientifically fascinating Sargasso Sea, the only named sea in the world defined entirely by ocean currents.
Surrounded by powerful Atlantic currents, this region behaves like a natural containment system, quietly shaping everything that drifts into it. Along the way, the episode dives into ocean gyres, the origins of sargassum seaweed, why the water is so clear and deep blue, and how an apparently empty stretch of ocean became one of the most biologically important places in the Atlantic.
Gordy also unpacks one of the ocean’s great unsolved mysteries: the epic migration of American and European eels, which travel thousands of miles toward this sea to reproduce, despite the fact that their spawning has never been directly observed in the wild. Add in floating ecosystems, invisible boundaries, and the unintended consequences of modern debris, and the Sargasso Sea becomes a masterclass in how motion, not land, can define a place.
This episode blends marine biology, oceanography, and true scientific mystery—the kind of knowledge that makes you dangerous in conversation.
Music thanks to Zapsplat.
Sources
Laffoley, D., et al. (2011). The protection and management of the Sargasso Sea: The golden floating rainforest of the Atlantic Ocean. Sargasso Sea Alliance.
Schmitz, W. J., & McCartney, M. S. (1993). On the North Atlantic circulation. Reviews of Geophysics, 31(1), 29–49.
Butler, J. N., Morris, B. F., Cadwallader, J., & Stoner, A. W. (1983). Studies of Sargassum and the Sargasso Sea. Bermuda Biological Station for Research, Special Publication No. 22.
Helfman, G. S., Facey, D. E., Hales, L. S., & Bozeman, E. L. (1987). Reproductive ecology of the American eel. American Fisheries Society Symposium, 1, 42–56.
Schmidt, J. (1923). Breeding places and migrations of the eel. Nature, 111, 51–54.
Miller, M. J., et al. (2015). Spawning by the European eel across 2000 km of the Sargasso Sea. Biology Letters, 11(11).
Carr, M. H., et al. (2002). Marine ecosystems and population dynamics of the Sargasso Sea. Oceanography, 15(2), 16–23.
Law, K. L., et al. (2010). Plastic accumulation in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. Science, 329(5996), 1185–1188.
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