Here’s what makes the Drake Passage so deadly

Environment

Have you seen the eye-popping videos on TikTok? Here’s why this turbulent waterway incites fear from sailors and curiosity from scientists.

ByChris Baraniuk

Published January 24, 2024

They were six voyagers rowing against the wind, against waves studded with shards of ice—it was, perhaps, the hardest way to get to Antarctica. In December 2019, explorer Fiann Paul led a team of athletes on an extraordinary expedition to row from South America to the ice-bound continent. To do it, they had to travel 600 miles across one of the most treacherous bodies of water in the world—the Drake Passage.

“Cold and wet,” says Paul, describing what it’s like. “It’s dirty.” The short waves that struck in quick succession were the worst: “They hit you like walls.” Deadly storms blow through this ferocious spot where the Pacific, Atlantic, and Southern Oceans meet.

On maps, the spindly arms of Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula reach out to grasp one another, separated only by the Drake Passage, which is named after Sir Francis Drake, a 16th-Century English explorer who had also been involved in the slave trade. Some prefer to call it Mar de Hoces, in reference to the Spanish sailor Francisco de Hoces who may have reached this part of the world 50 years before Drake. 

Some of the world’s strongest ocean currents flow through the Drake Passage and huge rogue waves have caused the deaths of passengers on ships there, as recently as 2022. Some voyagers have reported waves in excess of 65 feet.

Most people have never been to the Drake Passage. They might, however, have seen the jaw-dropping videos on TikTok, or other social media platforms, filmed by travellers on ships battered by towering seas.

(Learn more about the North Sea, another source of viral ocean videos.)

And yet tumultuous waves aren’t the only phenomenon that the region is known for.

Roaring winds and storms

The main reason why the Drake Passage is so beset by storms is because the Southern Ocean, which encircles the frozen continent of Antarctica, is unbroken by land, meaning that mighty winds can rush around the globe unimpeded.

“We’ve just been through a large storm actually, in the last 24 hours,” says Karen Heywood, a physical oceanographer at the University of East Anglia. She is a member of a research team aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough, which at the time of writing was sailing southeast through the Drake Passage to the Weddell Sea. On the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

“It’s always interesting when you go to dinner and they put sticky mats on all the tables to make sure your plates and things don’t slide around,” says Heywood.

She and her colleagues aim to study processes in the Weddell Sea that absorb carbon from the atmosphere and lock it up in the ocean. The Drake Passage itself is a “melting pot”, says Heywood, where extreme ocean currents take carbon, including that deposited by plankton, down into the depths where it could be stored for centuries. Strong currents in the passage also transport material from the Pacific thousands of miles away to the North Atlantic.

This turbulent body of water has another function—it keeps Antarctica cold says Alberto Naveira Garabato, a physical oceanographer at the University of Southampton. Without a land bridge to South America, it is much harder for warm air to make it to the globe’s most southerly reaches. Climate models suggest that when the Drake Passage opened tens of millions of years ago—no-one is quite sure exactly when—it contributed massively to the cooling of Antarctica. You can feel the chilling effect of the Drake Passage when you cross it on a ship, says Naveira Garabato.

“Suddenly you are in this icy world,” he explains. “It happens just like that—you can see the transition happening only in hours.”

A carbon sink

The cooling power of this unique place means that, somewhat ironically, the very dangerous Drake Passage helps protect the planet. If Antarctica were a much warmer place, and the 11.5 million square miles of ice packed around the continent melted tomorrow, global sea levels would rise by more than 195 feet.

The Drake Passage might also be a “hotspot” for carbon sequestration. The carbon storing processes studied by Heywood and her colleagues could be especially efficient here compared to other places on Earth, says Lilian Dove, a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University.

Her research suggests that the ocean is less stratified in this region—thanks in part to high winds and the irregular form of the seabed. That means that phytoplankton, for example, which capture carbon from the atmosphere, might be swept down into the depths in huge volumes. The Drake Passage could, then, be one of a handful of carbon sequestration hotspots in the Southern Ocean, which, collectively, removes 600 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. That equates to roughly one sixth of all the carbon emitted by human activities annually.

It’s important to remember the abundance of non-human life that thrives in the Drake Passage and other places around Antarctica, says Naveira Garabato. Vigorous currents transport nutrients far and wide, supporting life from plankton and krill all the way up to the largest whales. “The entire Antarctic ecosystem rests on this sort of upwelling,” he says.

Fiann Paul vividly remembers the penguins, dolphins, and whales that he and his team saw when they finally approached their goal, Charles Point on the Antarctic Peninsula, at the end of their rowing adventure. They had made it after 13 days duelling with one of the wildest places on Earth. After all those squally seas and grey skies, suddenly the bright white ice of Antarctica beckoned them, the sides of that ice coloured here and there an electric blue.

Some members of the expedition were so overjoyed to see it, Paul says, that they were moved to tears: “It’s such a beautiful place.”

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