Bering Strait

Bering straight is caveman speak for "My friend Bering, whom I am speaking about, is heterosexual". Apparently people kept calling him gay and...

Oh shit. Now you've gone and made him cry. Bering! Come back! I'm sure he didn't mean it...

You're an asshole, you know that?

But Bering's tears just came and came and came until the whole valley was flooded, and two great lands began to drift apart. This is the beautiful, touching, and tender legend told by peace-loving, frolicking natives of the primitive persuasion who hunt narwhals and geese on the shores of the Bering Strait to explain why there is all that water there now, when even older and less reliable ancestral tales told how you could walk all the way across to cities whose streets were paved with gold.

Geologists spoil the legend

Geologists are cruel, hard, flinty people with beards who like nothing better than to laugh at primitive people and disprove their most cherished beliefs with exact science. So it is, alas, for the Chukchi, Haida, Yupik, Gilyak, and other folk who were wont to stroll down to their beloved Bering Strait and sip its nourishing waters. Now they just sit about in tin-roofed shanty towns polluted by vast oil pipelines (causing the moose to shrink to the size of Shetland ponies, and the Shetland ponies to disappear entirely), gulping down fiery liquor. And that's how bad geologists are. omfg shutr up u guys a freaken dumb shts and i dont care about that sht i need to do a report and u ruin my time by doing this why dont u guys get a fucking life.... According to these shockingly ill-mannered cads, it was actually some Silurian oolitic feldspar whose sexuality was questioned, and which began to weep, but the weeping was a perfectly natural process, with volcanic pressure causing steam to condense out of the magma and melt the glaciers or something. If you went to that lecture can I borrow your notes?

There was a land bridge between Siberia and Greenland, even the most hardened Yupik admits that now, but it was built of gravel heaped up specifically for the purpose of crossing, and took simply ages. Contemporary pictures scratched into cave walls are often decorated with graffiti saying things like "Ooh, my back hurts", or "Pass it on, the supervisor looks like a walrus".

Flora and fauna

The Bering Strait is freezing cold, so no wildlife in its right mind would want to live there. This leaves it open as an ideal niche for various loony fauna and flora, such as the green bouncing whale, Steller's bagpiping sea anemone, and the wallaby, a long-footed, red-nosed tern with a spinning bow-tie.