Gulf of Mexico

The Gulf of Mexico is the vast, warm basin scooped into the underbelly of North America, an ocean within an ocean nearly enclosed by the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. It is the cradle of the Gulf Stream, the spawning ground of hurricanes that menace the American coast each summer, and the floor of the most intensive offshore oil industry in the Western Hemisphere. Its warm, turbid waters and sprawling river deltas have shaped the economies and cultures of every coast they touch.

Covering about 1.6 million square kilometres, the Gulf is a roughly oval basin whose centre, the Sigsbee Deep, sinks to somewhere between 3,750 and 4,400 metres. The Mississippi River pours an immense load of fresh water and sediment into it, building one of the world's great deltas and feeding a seasonal dead zone of oxygen-starved water. The Loop Current sweeps warm Caribbean water in through the Yucatán Channel and out past Florida, where it becomes the Gulf Stream. Hidden beneath the seabed are salt domes and the petroleum reservoirs they trap.

Long fished by Indigenous peoples and later the prize of Spanish, French, and American expansion, the Gulf became the energy engine of the United States in the twentieth century, its rigs marching ever deeper offshore. That dominance carried a price: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout unleashed the largest marine oil spill in history. The Gulf still lands much of the nation's shrimp and oysters, anchors its petrochemical industry, and absorbs the punishing hurricanes that its own warm waters help create.

• Caribbean Sea
  The tropical sea of pirates, coral, and a thousand islands connects to
• Atlantic Ocean
  The world's second-largest ocean and great highway of history drains to
• Mississippi River
  North America's great central artery, from Minnesota to the Gulf feeds from
• North America
  The third-largest continent, from the Arctic to the tropics located on