The Mindoro Strait () is one of the
strait
A strait is a water body connecting two seas or water basins. The surface water is, for the most part, at the same elevation on both sides and flows through the strait in both directions, even though the topography generally constricts the ...
s connecting the
South China Sea
The South China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean. It is bounded in the north by South China, in the west by the Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by the islands of Taiwan island, Taiwan and northwestern Philippines (mainly Luz ...
with the
Sulu Sea
The Sulu Sea (; Tausug: ''Dagat sin Sūg''; ; ) is a body of water in the southwestern area of the Philippines, separated from the South China Sea in the northwest by Palawan and from the Celebes Sea in the southeast by the Sulu Archipela ...
in the
Philippines
The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an Archipelagic state, archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it consists of List of islands of the Philippines, 7,641 islands, with a tot ...
. It separates
Mindoro Island
Mindoro is the seventh largest and eighth-most populous List of islands of the Philippines, island in the Philippines. With a total land area of 10,571 km2 ( 4,082 sq.mi ), it has a population of 1,408,454, as of the 2020 census. It is lo ...
from
Busuanga Island (one of the
Calamian Islands of
Palawan Province). Located between the two islands is the
Apo Reef, the largest coral reef system in the Philippines. The reef divides the strait into the Apo East Pass and the Apo West Pass.
[U.S. Corps of Engineers (1954)]
"San Jose (topographical map)"
University of Texas in Austin Library. Retrieved on 2014-09-24.
The Mindoro Strait is part of an alternative route for ships passing between the
Indian and
Pacific
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is bounded by the cont ...
ocean
The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Indian, Southern Ocean ...
s and a common one for those exceeding the
Malaccamax size and therefore incapable of using the
Strait of Malacca
The Strait of Malacca is a narrow stretch of water, long and from wide, between the Malay Peninsula to the northeast and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the southwest, connecting the Andaman Sea (Indian Ocean) and the South China Sea (Pa ...
.
Modern
bathymetric soundings have shown that the centers of the Mindoro Strait and the
Sibutu Passage are both deep enough that they probably existed during the
last ice age, thus contradicting the favored
H. Otley Beyer's theory that the
first settlers of the Philippines came through
land bridge
In biogeography, a land bridge is an isthmus or wider land connection between otherwise separate areas, over which animals and plants are able to cross and colonize new lands. A land bridge can be created by marine regression, in which sea le ...
s around that period. If verified, the earliest people of the country would have needed boats to cross the open sea to reach the islands.
See also
*
Balabac Strait – another strait connecting the South China Sea with the Sulu Sea
References
External links
A nautical chart of the area(soundings in
fathom
A fathom is a unit of length in the imperial and the U.S. customary systems equal to , used especially for measuring the depth of water. The fathom is neither an international standard (SI) unit, nor an internationally accepted non-SI unit. H ...
s)
Straits of the Philippines
Landforms of Occidental Mindoro
Landforms of Palawan
Straits of the South China Sea
Bodies of water of the Sulu Sea
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