Eighty-two kilometres of water hide a vanished ice-age highway
The Bering Strait separates Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula from Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, linking Pacific and Arctic Oceans along a maritime boundary near 168°58′37″ W. At its narrowest the gap is about 82 kilometres between Cape Dezhnev and Cape Prince of Wales—yet lowered glacial seas once laid bare the Beringia land bridge.
The strait sits just south of the Arctic Circle, around 65° 40′ north, between the Chukchi Sea on its Arctic side and the Bering Sea on its Pacific side. Its narrowest point runs between Cape Dezhnev, Asia's easternmost tip at 169° 39′ west, and Cape Prince of Wales, the westernmost point of mainland North America at 168° 05′ west. It is remarkably shallow, only about 90 metres at its deepest. Geologists think it first opened between 4.8 and 7.4 million years ago, and its narrowing about 900,000 years ago may have helped lengthen ice ages. The Yupik, Inuit and Chukchi peoples living sparsely on either side share cultural and linguistic ties.
Europeans long imagined a Strait of Anián separating the continents, from at least 1562. Semyon Dezhnyov probably sailed through in 1648, but word never reached Europe. Vitus Bering entered it in 1728, Mikhail Gvozdev made the first European crossing from Asia to America in 1732, and James Cook's third voyage passed through in 1778. By 1847 American whalers were hunting bowheads there.
The dominant theory of how the first Americans arrived holds that glaciers locked up so much water that the sea floor here and to the north and south lay exposed as a broad land bridge, Beringia, and people walked across. That idea has been the leading explanation for decades.
Modern travellers keep testing the gap. In March 1913 the German captain Max Gottschalk mushed a dog team from Siberia's east cape to Shishmaref via the Diomede Islands, the first documented crossing without a boat. In 1987 Lynne Cox swam 4.3 kilometres between the Diomedes in water of 3.3 °C and was congratulated by both Reagan and Gorbachev. Three teams tried the first modern sea-kayak crossing in 1989, one led by the paraplegic paddler Jim Noyes. In March 2006 Karl Bushby and Dimitri Kieffer walked 90 kilometres of frozen strait in 15 days, only to be arrested for entering Russia outside an official port.
Source: Bering Strait
