A review of the physicochemical features and phytoplankton community of the Bay of Bengal: Bangladesh perspective

Introduction:The Bay of Bengal (BoB) is the world’s biggest bay, with 1.4 billion people living along its shoreline in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, and Myanmar. It is a huge but shallow bay in the northeast of the Indian Ocean that covers approximately 2,173,000 square kilometers. It lies between 5 ° and 22 ° north latitude and 80 ° and 90 ° east longitude. It borders India and Sri Lanka to the west, Bangladesh to the north, and Myanmar (Burma) and the northern part of the Malay Peninsula to the east. The bay is roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) long and more than 8,500 feet deep on average (2,600 meters), with a maximum depth of 15,400 feet (4,694 meters). A number of major rivers flow into the Bay of Bengal, including the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM) on the north and the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri (Cauvery) on the west [1]. A wide U-shaped basin with a south entrance to the Indian Ocean characterizes the bottom topography. The Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal are twin seas that caress the western and eastern boundaries of the Indian subcontinent. The Andaman and Nicobar groups are the only islands that separate the bay from the Andaman Sea [2].