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Weddell Sea
The Weddell Sea is part of the Southern Ocean. Its land boundaries are defined by the bay formed from the coasts of Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula. Much of the southern part of the sea, up to Elephant Island, is permanent ice, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The sea is contained within the two overlapping Antarctic territorial claims of Argentina, (Argentine Antarctica) and Britain (British Antarctic Territory), and also resides partially within the territorial claim of Chile (Antarctic Chilean Territory). At its widest the sea is around 2,000 km across, in area it is around 2.8 million km.
The sea is named after the British sailor James Weddell who entered the sea in 1823 as far as 74 S. It was first widely explored by the Scot William S. Bruce over 1902-04.
It was in this sea that Shackleton's ship, the Endurance was trapped and crushed by ice in 1915.
The ice shelves which used to extend roughly 3900 square miles over the Weddell Sea have completely disappeared by 2002.
It is believed that the break-up of Gondwana started in the Weddell Sea.
See also
Weddell Seal
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Weddell Sea
