Sailing the Strait

In 1725, Russia's Peter the Great assigned Vitus Jonassen Bering, a Danish man who served as an officer in the Russian Navy, to set sail and explore the entire coast of Siberia. Bering sailed through the strait, proving for the first time that Asia and North America were, in fact, not joined by land. The Bering Straight links the waters of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Sea and the North Pacific and separates Asian and North American land masses. On average, the Bering Strait is 98 to 164 feet deep, (30 to 50 miles), and is 53 miles wide. The Bering Strait, Bering Sea and Bering Island were all named in honor of Vitus Jonassen Bering; however, the long-submerged ice age land bridge was not part of the discovery at the time.

While Bering successfully sailed the strait in 1725 he did not find evidence for the continental land bridge connection. Rather, some 125 years prior, a Jesuit priest named Jose de Acosta first proposed the possibility of a land bridge connecting Asia to North America to explain the origin of indigenous people in the Americas. In 1937, Swedish botanist Eric Hulten also proposed the possible existence of a land bridge where the Bering Strait exists to explain the similarities in plants between Arctic regions of Asia and North America. Hulten suggested these plants communities on both continents must have been connected via a land bridge at some point in the recent geological history. Hulten named the land bridge “Beringia” in honor of Vitus Bering. Hulten went on to further explain his own and others' hypotheses: that Beringia surfaced only when the surrounding sea level was low enough to cause the floors of the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea to become exposed, thereby forming the land bridge. However, before evidence for the long-submerged land mass could be proven, people had to further understand and investigate how it came to be in the first place and how it vanished.