Fair enough, but then “Rock 3” to distinguish ourselves from Rocks 1 and 2, closer to Sol. Unless we’re counting from the Kuiper Belt inward.
This map shows the whole thing a little better, methinks.
Is there a period in the year when it’s pack ice all the way from northern Canada and northern Russia to the Pole? There’s your window of opportunity, if so.
You can go over it all with a hovercraft… or one of them new-fangled aeroplanes.
Why worry about land vs. sea-based vessels at this point?
No. As you can tell, I simply ignored them.
What can I say, I’m a hopeless apostrophile. One of the beauties of the english language is that I can go ahead and spell a three-letter word wrong and everyone knows exactly what I’m saying.
I wouldn’t try that. Not with the ever Sarah and her ever vigilant Tea Party on the job.
Perhaps in theory. The reality is a different story.
But why stop at oceans? Why not eliminate the seas of the world, also? After all, the Med is just an extension of the Atlantic, and the Aegean and Adriatic just extensions of that. While we’re at it, somebody needs to do something about the Dead Sea and the Aral Sea, as it seems rather pretentious to call them “seas” instead of lakes. Damned geographic elitists pushing their watery agenda on us all. :mad:
You are losing ground in the ocean fight. In fact, the Southern Ocean is picking up some serious steam to become a real ocean itself. It was only a fringe ocean through some of the world until the last few years. Now, the Southern Ocean has campaigned successfully to become included in some U.S. elementary school textbooks which target the influential people of tomorrow.
I don’t know if we will see another serious ocean contender in my lifetime but I won’t say it is impossible. If you asked me what the odds were that there would only be 8 planets in our solar system when I was 30, I would have bet anything that it wouldn’t happen. Look out, Pluto pissed the wrong kind of people off and got disqualified as a planet just like that. Crushed like an overripe grape. I wouldn’t bet the farm that any of the rest of them, including earth, won’t gets get kicked out of the hallowed halls of Plantetdom at some point. The number of oceans might drop to one big one or they could double or triple depending on the way the political winds shift. That is what makes meta-geography such an exciting and unpredictable spectator sport.
You could cross the pack ice to Nome, but there aren’t any roads linking Nome to the rest of the road system. Once you get to Fairbanks you can drive on roads all the way to Panama. But then you hit the Darien Gap, and there aren’t any roads connecting through to Columbia.
You’d need a specially modified vehicle capable of driving over pack ice, swamp, tundra, rivers, jungle, and hills. I might suggest this: http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_aug2006/RedneckAirplane.jpg
FWIW, I agree with the OP. The only problem arises when we start to discuss what to name it. The Paclantic? The Indialantcific?
Wait, it’s not really a problem at all. We’ll simply call it The Ocean.
mmm
If you don’t agree now, just wait a while and you will. How long is yet to be determined.
:eek:
Don’t forget man did the same thing to Afro-Eurasia too, but that’s man-made and shouldn’t count.
Ask Karl Bushby, who is walking from Tierra del Fuego to his home in England. He’s already walked across the Bering Strait (to Russia’s chagrin, as that’s not an authorized border crossing point). He’s currently stymied by the Russian government, as they aren’t letting him walk further.
(My biggest wonder in his route isn’t how he would cross from N. America to Asia (living in the frozen north, it was obvious to me how), but how he will cross from the European mainland to England. The maps show the Chunnel, but you can’t walk in the Chunnel, can you?
England, an island, don’t count. What he meant was Europe. Right? 
And, boo Russia!
Maybe he’ll just pace a lot on the train.
I recall hearing from a sailor that the North Atlantic and South Atlantic should be counted as distinct oceans, so different are they in character.
No, no, a sea is just a small or branch ocean. Furthermore, if a permanent body of water has no outlet, and thus gains salt, it’s a sea. Thus, the Salton Sea, the Dead Sa, and… the [del]Great Salt Lake[/del] Utah Sea.
I think that would depend on how far south you go. I’ve been to both ends (Navy), and they were both pretty energetic.
You can snowmachine from Nome to Fairbanks fairly easily, or from Nome to Anchorage via the Iditarod Trail. You could also ski it, if you’re a true masochist.
My physical oceanography professor (somewhat jokingly) claimed there should really only be 3 oceans; the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans south of the equator were really just “offshoots” of the Southern Ocean, and the North Atlantic and North Pacific Gyres should be oceans in their own right. It makes some sense if you’re just looking at surface currents.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who got the urge to print this out, cut it up and tape it together into a mini-globe?