Drake Street
| Drake Street | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Connects waters | Atlantic Ocean | |
| with water | Pacific Ocean | |
| Separates land mass | Cape Horn ( South America ) | |
| of land mass | South Shetland Islands | |
| Data | ||
| Geographical location | 59 ° S , 63 ° W | |
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| Smallest width | 800 km | |
| Islands | Hermite Islands , Diego Ramírez Islands , Van Rocks | |
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As Drake ( Drake Passage ) is the strait between the southern tip of South America ( Cape Horn ) and the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula ( Prime Head , nördlichster point of Trinity Peninsula called). It connects the Atlantic Ocean , especially the Scotia Sea , with the Pacific Ocean and belongs to the Southern Ocean .
Surname
It is named after Francis Drake , who accidentally discovered it on his circumnavigation of the world in search of two escort ships that had drifted away in a storm.
history
The lake area was first used in 1616 by Willem Cornelisz Schouten , who originally named the street after Jakob Le Maire , the discoverer of Cape Horn , Strait of Le Maire . It is possible that the area was already navigated by the Spanish captains Francisco de Hoces (1526) and Gabriel de Castilla (1603) before Drake and Schouten . This is why the Strait of the Sea is often referred to as Mar de Hoces in Spanish, Argentine and Chilean sources .
In Spanish, however, Estrecho de Le Maire is the passage between Tierra del Fuego and State Island .
On December 9, 2019, a Lockheed C-130H Hercules transport plane crashed over Drake Street , and all 38 people on board lost their lives.
geography
The strait from the State Island to the South Shetland Islands is 480 nautical miles wide and almost free of islands, which gives the Antarctic Circumpolar Current the opportunity to be the only ocean current to flow around the entire globe. This prevents the penetration of warmer water on the Antarctic coast and thus enables the formation of the huge ice cap. Until the late Eocene (around 35 million years ago) the Drake Strait was still closed and the Antarctic was much warmer than it is today, comparable to today's Scandinavia.
The fauna of the lake area is rich. Whales and dolphins , but also albatrosses and penguins can be observed.
