On reaching the North American coast, he proceeded northward, fixed the position of the western extremity of America and surveyed Bering Strait.
The ridge across Denmark Strait west of Iceland nowhere exceeds 300 fathoms in depth, so that the deeper water of the North Polar Basin is effectively separated from that of the Atlantic. A third small basin occupies Baffin Bay and contains a maximum depth of 1050 fathoms. Depths of from loo to 300 fathoms are not uncommon amongst the channels of the Arctic Archipelago north of North America, and Bering Strait, through which the surface water of the Arctic Sea meets that of the Pacific, is only 28 fathoms deep.
As one of the Bering Sea Commissioners he spent the summer of 1891 investigating the facts of the seal fisheries on the northern coasts of Asia and America.
The Cossack Simon Dezhneff is thought to have made a voyage, in the summer of 1648, from the river Kolyma, through Bering Strait (which was rediscovered by Vitus Bering in 1728) to Anadyr.
In September 1740 Vitus Bering sailed from Okhotsk on a second Arctic voyage with George William Steller on board as naturalist.