Talk:Sea

Potential content for the history section?

I've cut out this recently added content that was at ocean because I think it doesn't fit there but it might fit here. As per the hatnotes, we know that ocean and sea overlap but we've tried to separate them by saying that sea is more about the cultural aspects. The text which was written by User:Thiagovscoelho is interesting but is not sourced very well (for some sections there are no sources) and when sources are given they are sometimes hard to access and are primary sources, not secondary ones. Also it reads a bit essay like or academic. I am wondering if it might fit better in a sub-article, like perhaps The sea in culture. EMsmile (talk) 19:25, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

History The concept of the ocean, originally a part of Greek mythology, has evolved since antiquity into a purely geographical concept. This section is about the history of the concept of "ocean" within geography, not about the history of the ocean itself, for which see § Natural history.

Antiquity

Main article: Oceanus

Detail of Oceanus attending the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on an Attican black-figure dinos by Sophilos, c. 600–550 BC, British Museum 971.11–1.1.

In ancient Greek thought, the term Ὠκεανός (Oceanus) referred to a great river or sea that flowed in a circle around the inhabited earth. (For details on the word, see § Etymology.) Homer's epics describe Okeanos as a mighty river girdling the world's edge, "backflowing" upon itself, literally bounding the Earth and depicted as the rim of Achilles' shield. In these myths, Oceanus was also personified as a Titan deity, a son of Uranus and Gaia.

As geographic knowledge advanced in the classical era, the concept of the ocean began to shift from myth to empirical geography. By the Hellenistic period, Greek explorers had ventured farther, and the old cosmological idea of a neat fresh-water ring-ocean was gradually discarded. The encircling Okeanos was reinterpreted as the actual saltwater expanses known to mariners, notably the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, rather than a literal river boundary. Nevertheless, early Greco-Roman geographers still retained the notion of a singular surrounding ocean in some form. The Roman geographer Pomponius Mela (1st century AD) wrote that the inhabited world "is entirely surrounded by the Ocean, from which it receives four seas". These four inner seas (e.g. the Mediterranean) were thought of as bays or gulfs branching off the encircling Ocean.

However, accumulating discoveries required modifications to this worldview. By the 2nd century, the geographer Ptolemy distinguished multiple oceans on his world maps. Ptolemy identified, for instance, a "Western Ocean" (Oceanus Occidentalis, corresponding to the Atlantic) separate from an Eastern ocean, and other large marine basins. Still, in common parlance one might simply speak of "the Ocean" to mean the vast western sea; Julius Caesar, for example, referred to the Atlantic as Oceanus as if it were the Ocean proper.

Medieval views of the "Ocean sea"

This T and O map, from the first printed version of Isidore's Etymologiae, is surrounded by the MARE OCEANVM (Ocean Sea).

See also: T and O map

"Ocean Sea" redirects here. For the 1993 novel by Alessandro Baricco, see Ocean Sea (novel).

Medieval scholars inherited the classical concept of a world ocean and often reinforced it with biblical and classical lore. The Latin term mare oceanum ("Ocean Sea") became standard in medieval writings and maps to denote the great outer sea encircling the three known continents. Manuscript maps like the famous T-O mappae mundi explicitly show the world as a disk of land surrounded by a continuous ring of ocean. In the 7th century, Isidore of Seville taught that "the world is like a wheel [...] and the Ocean flowing around it is contained in a circular boundary," beyond which lie the divisions of Asia, Europe, and Africa. This encircling "Ocean Sea" marked the conceptual boundary of the habitable world for medieval Europeans. It was seen an unknown void at the edge of maps, sometimes labeled with sea monsters and legends.

Despite the intellectual awareness (since antiquity) that the Earth is round, medieval geography still effectively placed all known lands in an island-like mass encircled by water. The Atlantic Ocean in particular, stretching west of Europe, was often simply called the Ocean Sea. Well into the 15th century, this term persisted. Notably, when Christopher Columbus proposed sailing westward, he and his contemporaries spoke of crossing the Mar Océano (Ocean Sea) to reach Asia. The Spanish crown even granted Columbus the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea"; this shows how, even into the early Age of Discovery, the ancient notion of a singular encircling ocean was still prevalent.

Age of Discovery and early modern changes

Universalis Cosmographia, also known as the Waldseemüller map, dated 1507, was the first map to show the Americas separating two distinct oceans. South America was generally considered the New World and shows the name "America" for the first time, after Amerigo Vespucci

The great voyages of the late 15th and 16th centuries dramatically expanded European conceptions of the ocean. As explorers ventured beyond the known world-ocean, they encountered new vast waters that demanded naming and distinction. After Columbus opened the way across the Atlantic (the long-feared Ocean Sea), explorers soon realized that there were more oceans. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed Panama and beheld an unknown sea to the west, calling it the Mar del Sur ("Southern Sea"). A few years later, Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation definitively linked this "Southern Sea" to the rest of the globe. Upon entering its waters in 1521, Magellan named it the Pacific Ocean (Mar Pacífico, "peaceful sea") due to its calm winds at the time. Due to this, the Pacific was recognized as a separate ocean (the largest on Earth) rather than part of an all-encompassing Ocean Sea.

With such discoveries, cartographers and writers increasingly spoke of multiple oceans. The term "Indian Ocean" (Oceanus Indicus) also came into common usage around the early 16th century. It appeared in Latin by 1515, referring to the "Eastern Ocean" near India as distinct from the "Western Ocean" (the Atlantic). In other words, once Europeans knew of the route around Africa, they identified an Indian Ocean basin separate from the Atlantic. By the 17th century, the Atlantic itself was no longer equated with the entire outer ocean, but was just one of the world's great oceans. European languages began standardizing the names Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, etc., for these distinct bodies of water. The medieval phrase "Ocean Sea" fell out of use by around 1650, as people spoke simply of "the ocean" or specific oceans. English writings of the 17th century onward tend to use ocean in the singular for the whole body of saltwater, or pluralize it to discuss the various oceans of the world.

The early modern period also saw the delineation of additional oceans. Navigators probed the far north, giving rise to the idea of a "Northern Ocean," later called the Arctic Ocean once its polar character was known. Likewise, in southern latitudes, the waters encircling Antarctica came to be referred to as the Southern Ocean (or Antarctic Ocean) in some accounts. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European maps clearly demarcated at least four vast oceans: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic, with the southern polar waters sometimes treated as extensions of the first three or as a separate "Great Southern Ocean" in certain geographies.

References

EMsmile (talk) 19:25, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

The section was about history of geography, not about "cultural aspects". It's about precursors to the modern concept, like how the article about species covers the history of that idea in biology before and since Linnaeus, and how the article about chemical elements has a history section mentioning classical elements. I don't think anything was totally unsourced but some of the sources were primary when they were only to attest usage of a word. Maybe it was not high enough quality but I think it was fully on-topic. Thiagovscoelho (talk) 21:14, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your fast reply. Quite a few of the paragraphs have no sources. Where sources are given, these are often difficult to access/understand. To me the text reads very much to be about "what humans think or used to think" (and some of it might be WP:OR?), and therefore it might fit better at sea as that article is more human-centric whereas the other one (ocean) is more natural sciences centric. It could also fit at The sea in culture (slightly strange article title), don't you think? Please note the ocean article is a high level article and already very large (51 kB without your history section), so I think an overly long and detailed history section would not be suitable there. Mind you, sea is also very long (71 kB) so that could be a problem as well. - Let's see what the other page watchers of ocean and sea think? EMsmile (talk) 21:57, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't see any need to go in such a direction here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:02, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Marine Microbiology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 January 2026 and 10 April 2026. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): RueiJie (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Pahellalani (talk) 01:11, 23 January 2026 (UTC)