Sigsbee Deep

The Sigsbee Deep[Note 1] (Mexico basin in the U. S. Board on Geographic Names Advisory Committee on Undersea Features Gazetteer)[1] is a roughly triangular basin that is the deepest part of the Gulf of Mexico named for Charles Dwight Sigsbee.

The basin is located in the southwestern quadrant of the gulf, with its closest point to the U.S. coast at 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Brownsville, Texas.

[3] The Sigsbee Abyssal Plain is the deepest and flattest sector of the deep basin.

[1] The use of "Sigsbee" for the feature originates from Commander Charles Dwight Sigsbee's Gulf of Mexico surveys that defined the general features of the body while he was commanding officer of the USC&GS George S. Blake.

The United States' proposal to rename the 23° 52′ N 91° 35′ W point "Mexico basin was rejected while the ACUF Mexico basin with "Sigsbee deep" as an alternate name is given in the NGA database as 25° N 92° W.[4][5] There are other features with BGN approved names in the region in recognition of Sigsbee:[4][6]

Contour map of Gulf of Mexico as sounded by the C&GS Steamer Blake between 1873 and 1875. Over 3,000 soundings went into this chart, most of the deep water soundings taken by the Sigsbee Sounding Machine. This was the first realistic bathymetric map of any oceanic basin. In: "Three Cruises of the BLAKE" by Alexander Agassiz, 1888. P. 102.