Crews still call it the most brutal ocean stretch on Earth—a graveyard of ships where waves rise taller than apartment buildings. The Drake Passage sits between Antarctica and South America, a violent chokepoint where three oceans collide and storms can appear without warning with winds that would flatten a city.
The Drake Passage is a roughly 600-mile stretch of ocean between the southern tip of South America and the South Shetland Islands, north of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the narrowest point in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the strongest ocean current on the planet. That current flows uninterrupted around Antarctica, driven by westerly winds with no landmass to slow it down.Because the passag…