Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Ocean is a body of water between North America and South America in the west, and Europe and Africa in the east. Christopher Columbus crossed it in 1492, centuries after Scandinavian Vikings crossed it and established the Vinland settlement.

The name derives from its being the supposed location of Atlantis.

Islands in the Atlantic Ocean include the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Falkland Islands. The Caribbean Sea is a bay off the Atlantic.

Some geographers had noticed that the east and west coastlines of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to line up, but dismissed this as a co-incidence. The theory of plate tectonics, which suggested the line-up was due to the continents slowly moving away from one another as the Ocean grew wider, was initially dismissed. Later the theory was accepted as credible, and Geologist now recognize that new ocean emerges at the mid-Atlantic ridge.