Monsoon rivers dump a million-square-mile bay of sediment
The Bay of Bengal, some 2.6 million square kilometres of northeastern Indian Ocean between the subcontinent and Indochina, takes its name from historic Bengal. India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and the Andaman–Nicobar chain frame waters once called Mahodadhi, Sinus Gangeticus, Kalinga Sagar, or Vanga Sea.
The bay fills the north-eastern corner of the Indian Ocean, with India to the west and north-west, Bangladesh to the north, Myanmar to the north-east and India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the east. Its southern edge runs from Sangaman Kanda in Sri Lanka to the north-western tip of Sumatra. The International Hydrographic Organization traces the eastern boundary from Cape Negrais in Burma through the main Andaman islands, leaving the narrow channels between them outside the bay, and fixes the southern limit at Adam's Bridge and Dondra Head.
A remarkable number of great rivers end here: the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Irrawaddy, along with the Godavari, Krishna, Mahanadi, Kaveri and several smaller ones. Cox's Bazar and Marina, among the longest unbroken sandy beaches on the planet, line its shores, as does the Sundarbans, the biggest mangrove forest anywhere.
Names reflect whoever held the coast. The modern one comes from the historical Bengal region, today Bangladesh plus West Bengal, Tripura and southern Assam's Barak Valley. Ancient Indian texts may call it Mahodadhi; Greeks and Romans named it the Gulf of the Ganges, a label that lingered on European maps. Around Odisha and Andhra it was the Kalinga Sea after the old kingdom of Kalinga, classical India knew it as Vaṅgasāgara, and Tamil poets wrote of Vanga Kadal. After the Chola navy under Rajaraja I and Rajendra I took control around 1014, some called it the Chola Sea or Chola Lake.
Empires kept reaching its western shore. Chandragupta Maurya pushed his realm across northern India to the bay, the Kushanas may have got there in the mid-first century AD, and the Kakatiyas held the coast between the Godavari and Krishna. The Northern Circars strip corresponds to modern Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese set up trading posts at Chittagong, which they called Porto Grande, and Satgaon, Porto Pequeno, while Hajipur served as a base for Portuguese pirates.
Source: Bay of Bengal
