Random Sea Name Generator

How this random sea generator works

Press Generate and you get a sea. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Barents. Weddell. Andaman. Sargasso. Ross. The entries are ordered by the ocean they belong to.

A reasonable question: who decides that a stretch of open water is a sea, what it is called, and where it stops? The answer involves a book that has not been updated since 1953.

The official map of the world's seas was printed in 1953

The organisation responsible is the International Hydrographic Organization. Its publication is called Limits of Oceans and Seas, catalogued as S-23, and it exists because in 1919 a conference of hydrographers decided somebody had better write down where each sea begins and ends.

The first edition came out in 1928. The second in 1937. The third in 1953.

The third edition is still the one in force.

Seventy-odd years. A document written before the discovery of the structure of DNA, before satellites, before the first computer most people had heard of, is still the authoritative statement of where the Adriatic ends and the Ionian begins.

Adriatic Sea, Arabian Sea, Bering Sea, Coral Sea, Gulf of Aden, Kara Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sargasso Sea. All of them are bounded by lines drawn in that book, or by the practice that grew around it.

The revision that would have renamed sixty seas

They have tried. Twice.

In 1977 the member states agreed a new edition was needed. A draft fourth edition was circulated in 1986. It was not adopted.

Work started again, and in August 2002 a second draft went out. This one would have changed the title of the publication itself, from Limits of Oceans and Seas to Names and Limits of Oceans and Seas, and it would have altered the official name of roughly sixty of them.

Sixty. Not sixty new seas. Sixty existing seas whose official names would have changed on every chart in the world.

It was never ratified. Member states could not agree, and the disagreements were about names rather than about hydrography. So S-23, third edition, 1953, stayed in force by default, and it is in force today.

The IHO's answer, eventually, was to stop fighting over the book and build something else. A project called S-130 is producing a digital dataset of global sea areas, designed for modern charting software, in which each sea area is an object with an identifier attached to it.

Read that again. After seventy years of failing to agree what to call the world's seas, the solution being built is one where the name is a field rather than the thing itself.

Not everything called a sea is a sea

Generate for long enough and the word starts changing.

You will get the Gulf of Aden, Spencer Gulf and Amundsen Gulf. You will get Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay and the Bay of Bengal. You will get straits, a channel or two, a passage, and a bight.

This is inherited from the register itself. The publication is called Limits of Oceans and Seas and it defines the limits of gulfs, bays, straits and channels too, because a ship needs to know where it is regardless of what the water is called.

And there is no scientific difference between a sea, a gulf and a bay. A gulf is usually more enclosed than a bay, and a sea is usually bigger than both, and none of that is a rule anybody enforces. The Bay of Bengal is larger than most gulfs. The Persian Gulf would be a sea in another language.

The words are historical. They record what the first chart-maker to write the name happened to call it, and charts are conservative documents.

The seas named after people who went there

Go south and the names change character completely.

Weddell. Ross. Amundsen. Bellingshausen. Davis. Mawson. Lazarev. Riiser-Larsen. Somov. D'Urville. King Haakon VII.

Every one of them is a person, and almost every one of them is a person who sailed into that water when nobody knew what was there. The Southern Ocean is the only part of the world where the map is a roll-call of the people who made it.

Two more in that stretch are named not for people but for the act of going. The Cosmonauts Sea and the Cooperation Sea, both charted by Soviet Antarctic expeditions, both carrying the vocabulary of the era that named them.

Compare the Mediterranean, which means "in the middle of the land", and the Baltic, and the Red Sea, whose names are older than the idea of naming anything after a person.

A map is a document about who arrived and when.

Ways people actually use this

• Geography quizzes. Generate five and ask which ocean each belongs to. The Antarctic ones will finish everybody.
• Naming things. Ships, projects, servers, storms. Bellingshausen and Lincoln both sound like they mean something.
• Worldbuilding. A sea has a shape, an enclosure, a trade route and a name that tells you who charted it. All four are decisions.
• Reading roulette. The Sargasso Sea has no coastline. It is bounded entirely by currents. Look it up.
• Teaching how conventions ossify. One book, 1953, still running.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type Sea into Contains and look at what does not come back. Those are the gulfs, bays, straits and channels that a sea register quietly contains.
• Type Gulf. Some are written "Gulf of X" and some "X Gulf", which is a small window into who named them and in what language.
• Ends with F returns the gulfs whose names put the word last.
• Starts with matches the first character of the whole entry, so the Bay of Bengal is filed under B for Bay, not under B for Bengal.

Questions people ask

How many seas are there?

There is no fixed number. The current authoritative document is the International Hydrographic Organization's Limits of Oceans and Seas, third edition, published in 1953. Two attempts to replace it have failed.

What is the difference between a sea and an ocean?

Size and enclosure. Oceans are the five great basins. Seas are smaller, usually partly enclosed by land, and almost always part of an ocean. The Sargasso Sea is the exception: it has no land boundary at all, only currents.

What is the difference between a gulf and a bay?

Nothing you can rely on. A gulf tends to be larger and more enclosed. The Bay of Bengal is bigger than most gulfs. The names are historical, not technical.

Why has the register not been updated since 1953?

Because updating it means agreeing on names, and the member states have not been able to. Draft revisions in 1986 and 2002 were circulated and neither was adopted. The organisation is now building a digital dataset instead.

What is the largest sea?

It depends where you draw its limits, which is precisely what the 1953 document exists to tell you, and precisely what a 2002 revision would have changed for sixty of them.

References

1. Limits of Oceans and Seas, S-23, 3rd edition, 1953
2. UNGEGN session paper on sea names and limits
3. Limits of Oceans and Seas