Atlantic Ocean Beaches

The Atlantic touches more of this register than any other body of water, and almost nothing can be said about all of it. Its northern reaches hold cold-water shores where the value is landscape rather than swimming — Iceland, the Hebrides, the Norwegian coast. Its middle latitudes produce the great surf coasts of Portugal, Morocco and the Basque country, where upwelling keeps the water cold at latitudes that suggest otherwise. Its tropical western edge holds the Caribbean approaches and the coral sand of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. Its eastern tropics run into the Canary Current, which is why West African beaches are cooler than the map implies. The one generalisation that holds is exposure: with no barrier reef along most of it, Atlantic beaches take swell directly, and the register's rip-current and lifeguard notes cluster here. Two conditions recur across its warm western basin and should be planned for: hurricane season from June to November, and sargassum arriving on Caribbean and Gulf-facing shores between roughly April and August in volumes that vary sharply year to year.

They spread across sixteen beach worlds, the largest group being eight cliff and calanque beaches. Together they account for 472 km of shore. · computed from the 61 records below