Diomede Sea

Dìomídé waters occupy the Bering Strait, separating the Chukchi Peninsula of the Russian Far East from the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. The strait is the narrow doorway between the Pacific and Arctic oceans. At its closest, Cape Dezhnev and Cape Prince of Wales lie only about eighty-two kilometres apart, and the seafloor beneath the passage reaches a depth of no more than ninety metres. The Chukchi Sea opens north of the strait, while the Bering Sea lies south.

This shallow connection has shaped a much longer human geography. During the Ice Age, glaciers held vast quantities of water and sea levels fell, exposing the seabed as the Bering land bridge. The theory that humans crossed from Asia into North America through Beringia became the leading explanation for early peopling of the Americas. The later passage still brings Chukchi, Yupik and Inuit communities into a shared maritime world, with cultural and linguistic ties on both shores.

Navigation and politics later made the same narrow water strategically significant. Imperial Russia and the United States divided the surrounding coasts, the present maritime boundary dates from their nineteenth-century arrangement, and the Cold War turned the strait into a monitored frontier. Sea ice, shallow banks and the proximity of two continents have always made this water a passage as well as a boundary.