Angola Basin
The up to 5841 m deep Angola tank is a deep sea basins in the South Atlantic and the deepest part of the southeastern Atlantic Ocean .
geography
The Angola Basin , which got its name from the South African Angola and almost everywhere reaches depths of over 5000 m, is located approximately between 3 ° and 35 ° south latitude and between 10 ° west and 10 ° east longitude . From the coast of Angola, the deep-sea basin extends about 2500 km west to the southern part of the mid-Atlantic ridge ; its north-south extension is about 4000 km.
In this area it lies between the Guinea sill lying in the Atlantic in the northwest, the Lower Guinea sill lying on the mainland of Africa and its offshore coast in the east, the whale ridge lying in the sea in the south and St. Helena in the west; Behind this island rises the South Atlantic Ridge in the southern middle of the ocean , on which only the small islands of Ascension (south of the equator ) and Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic sit not far from the Angola Basin .
exploration
Scientists suspect that the Angola Basin mainly between 14 ° and 21 ° south latitude and from the prime meridian to 4 ° west longitude even reaches depths of over 6000 m several times. Since most of the deep-sea areas explored so far are located close to the coast, the fauna in the deep-sea regions of the Angola Basin 1000 kilometers offshore is very different from that in other deep-sea basins. Many of the as yet undiscovered 10 million animal species that one suspects in the ocean are therefore hoped to find there. These include, in particular, protozoa , crustaceans and bristle worms .
Angola basin in comparison
The Angola Basin is, even if the thesis with the 6000 m depth were to be confirmed, not the deepest deep-sea basin. The Argentine Basin with 6202 m and the Northern Brazilian Basin with 6537 m in the Southwest Atlantic are even deeper. In the area of the narrow South Sandwich Trench , which lies between 1,500 and 2,000 km north of Antarctica and directly east of the South Sandwich Islands in the extreme South Atlantic, it goes significantly further down at 8,264 m.