Drake Passage

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The gap between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula, and the narrowest constriction on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current's circuit. Because the whole current must pass through it, the passage has been the natural place to measure the ACC since the 1970s; the cDrake array of moored current meters and pressure-recording inverted echo sounders occupied it from 2007 to 2011 and produced the 173.3 Sv mean transport figure. The opening of this gateway, together with the deepening of the Tasman gateway, is what allowed a circumpolar current to exist at all, though when that happened is genuinely disputed.