Top 10 seas facts

Bolivia. Although Bolivia has been landlocked since the War of the Pacific in 1879, it still maintains its navy, which patrols Lake Titicaca and Bolivia's larger rivers. The Navy serves as a symbol that the country has not given up on regaining its lost access to the sea. As of 2008, the Bolivian Naval Force had approximately 5,000 personnel.

A fizz. When a piece of iceberg ice melts, it makes a fizzing sound called "Bergie Seltzer". This sound is made when the water-ice interface reaches compressed air bubbles trapped in the ice. As this happens, each bubble bursts, making a 'popping' sound. The bubbles contain air trapped in snow layers very early in the history of the ice, that eventually got buried to a given depth (up to several kilometers) and pressurized as it transformed into firn then to glacial ice.

In Helsinki. These powerful icebreakers are docked for the summer season at the port of Helsinki. Almost all of Finland trade comes through the brackish Gulf of Finland, which freezes easily during winter.

From garbage. Sea glass beaches are created from years of dumping garbage into an area of coastline. Sea glass begins as normal shards of broken glass that are then persistently tumbled and ground until the sharp edges are rounded.

American lobster. In the 1990s several cod stocks collapsed due to overfishing. With the large predatory fish removed, their prey have undergone population explosions, and the capture of lobster has tripled since 1970.

Water salinity. Launched June 10, 2011, Aquarius is NASA’s first satellite instrument specifically designed to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. The complete first year dataset of NASA's Aquarius instrument reveals seasonal changes in the Amazon River's plume. Depending on the prevailing currents, the river's freshwater outflow heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean.

12 000 years old. The Baltic Sea is one of the youngest seas in the world. It was formed after the last ice age as an ice-lake, which later turned into a sea.

Sargasso Sea. The Atlantic Ocean's Sargasso Sea was named after the Sargassum seaweed, which floats en masse on the surface there. Although it was formerly thought to cover the entirety of the Sargasso Sea, making navigation impossible, it has since been found to occur only in drifts. The historic incidents of sailing ships being trapped there are now considered due to the often calm winds of the horse latitudes.

Name of Etruscans. The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast of Italy. It is named for the Tyrrhenian people, identified since the 6th century BCE with the Etruscans of Italy.

Black Sea. The coccolithophore are calcite-shedding phytoplankton that has been a part of the Black Sea ecology for millennia. In the summer it can colour much of the Black Sea cyan, as is evident in this satellite image collected on July 15, 2012.