Why the Southern Tip of South America is the Deadliest Place in All the Oceans | Cape Horn

Cape Horn is the most feared point in all the world's oceans. At the southern tip of South America, where the Atlantic and Pacific collide with no land to stop them, more than 800 ships sank and between ten thousand and twenty thousand sailors died over four centuries of navigation. Not by bad luck. By physics. In this documentary about Cape Horn and the Drake Passage we explain why this 800-kilometer corridor at the southern tip of South America is a category of its own among all the dangerous seas in the world. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the most powerful ocean current on the planet, moves between one hundred and one hundred and fifty million cubic meters of water per second and is forced through that corridor, accelerating and concentrating the energy of an entire ocean into a minimal space. Winds that have been circling the planet for millions of years without finding any continental obstacle generate twenty-meter waves as a matter of routine. The water is at two degrees Celsius. A man who falls into the sea has minutes before losing muscular coordination. From Magellan's expedition in 1519 to the last commercial sailing ship that crossed the cape in 1949. From the shipwreck of the San Telmo in 1819 and its 644 men dragged to Antarctica to Shackleton's crossing in a six-meter boat through the Drake Passage in 1916. And from the 800 sunken ships to the 2,000 that still cross every year because they are too large for the Panama Canal. Subscribe to stay updated on our next documentaries about the most dangerous seas in the world and the mysteries of historical navigation.