The Pacific Ocean is dotted with thousands of major and minor islands, offering sailors a paradise of exploration.
In the Atlantic Ocean, are there any islands–even tiny ones–located between the continental U.S. and, let’s say, the Azores, by way of a fairly direct trip? (i.e., not by way of the Caribbean).
It’s a big ocean. Surely there must be a small island somewhere that sailors could head to, if need be.
There’s Bermuda. And then there’s Bermuda. (It’s actually a collection of small islands.) That’s all I can see on my world map. Nothing much there except sargassum weed.
Would Bermuda make you feel any better?
Generally, there are far fewer islands in the Atlantic because of the way it is forming. The Americas are drifting apart from Europe and Africa, with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (of undersea mountains) slowly pushing up to fill in the gap. The Azores are on a spur of that ridge and the Bermuda archipelago is on a separate “rise,” but most of the rest of the Atlantic is floored by the “valley” between the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the continental plates. There are a number of small islands off the coast of Africa, reaching out toward Spain, the most famous of which are the Canaries, and there are several rocks sticking up off the end of the North American plate east of Newfoundland near the Grand Banks, but the North Atlantic is not a good place to find islands, generally.
(There are also sections of the Pacific that are larger than the Atlantic that have few to no islands, but the areas that have islands get more attention–because they have islands (and becuase they are in more heavily travelled waters).
There is Rockall Island, about 300 miles west of the British Isles. It’s only 100 feet long, though.
In the South Atlantic, you have the inhabited islands of Ascension, St. Helena, and Tristan da Cunha, all of which appear to stradle the mid-Atlantic ridge.
Unbelievable.
I originally had Bermuda in my OP, but then rephrased the entire question and somehow left it off, thinking someone was going to catch me with a technicality, as in Greenland or the Caribbean.
Let me therefore make my question semi-comprehensible…
Any islands directly between Bermuda and the Azores?
No.
To exapnd on that just a bit, the closest you get to an island between the Azores and Bermuda is a sea mount atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where it rises to within 752 feet of the surface. Nothing comes closer to being an island. Extending the discussion to the whole of the Atlantic north of the Equator, there is a small group of rocks, the St. Paul Rocks, at 1° N 29°23’ W about a quarter of the way from the bulge of South America toward the bulge of Africa. There is something called Flemish Cap off the Grand Banks, but I can’t quite tell whether it is a rock or a reef. Everything else is either in the Antilles or off the coast of Africa or huddled near the shores of Britain and Ireland or Greenland and Iceland.
Wasn’t Flemish Cap where the “Andrea Gale” was headed?
Flemish Cap is an underwater plateau adjacent to the Grand Banks, and does not project above the surface.