Boundary current a basin (such as the Gulf Stream, a current on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean) are stronger than those on the eastern boundary (such as the California Current, on the eastern side of the Pacific Ocean). Western intensification was first explained by the American oceanographer Henry Stommel. In 1948, Henry Stommel published a paper in "Transactions, American Geophysical Union" titled "The Westward Intensification of Wind-Driven Ocean Currents", in which he used a simple, homogeneous, rectangular ocean model to examine the streamlines and surface height contours for an ocean at a non-rotating frame, an ocean characterized by a constant
Atlantic Ocean South America, and north-eastern Europe. In the western Atlantic carbonate platforms dominate large areas, for example the Blake Plateau and Bermuda Rise. The Atlantic is surrounded by passive margins except at a few locations where active margins form deep trenches: the Puerto Rico Trench ( maximum depth) in the western Pacific and South Sandwich Trench () in the South Atlantic. There are numerous submarine canyons off north-eastern North America, western Europe, and north-western Africa. Some of these canyons extend along the continental rises and farther into the abyssal plains as deep-sea channels. In 1922 a historic moment in cartography and