Natural Environment
A branch of the warm Kuroshio Current warms the bay, allowing it to host marine organisms typical of more southerly regions and giving a mild climate to the land bordering the bay. The maximum depth of the bay is about 1500 meters.
Organisms from sub-arctic regions are also advected into the bay by intrusions of the Oyashio Current resulting in a very high biodiversity. It is the major study site for research programs at the University of Tokyo (ORI) and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC).
In 2004, soil samples from the bay were found to contain radioactive contamination from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests that took place from 1946 to 1958.
Read more about this topic: Sagami Bay
Famous quotes containing the words natural environment, natural and/or environment:
“Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the free play of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.... The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)