Gulf of America is the name the United States federal government has used since February 2025 for the American portion of the Gulf of Mexico. Executive Order 14172, signed on 20 January 2025, directed the renaming of the continental shelf area bounded by Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, extending out to the maritime boundaries with Mexico and Cuba. Mexico and Cuba continue to call the whole basin the Gulf of Mexico, and so does most of the world.
The order, and the line it drew offshore
EO 14172 was signed on inauguration day and titled "Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness." It carried two renamings: the Gulf, and the reversion of Denali to Mount McKinley.
The Gulf clause is unusually specific about where it stops. It covers the shelf off five American states out to the boundary with Mexico and Cuba — not the basin as a whole. That drafting choice matters. It means the federal position is not that the Gulf of Mexico ceased to exist, but that the American slice of it now carries an American name, in the same way a country names its own territorial sea features without claiming its neighbour's.
Implementation moved quickly. The Interior Department announced adoption on 24 January 2025. A Secretary's Order on 7 February instructed the Board on Geographic Names to act, and the board entered the change in the Geographic Names Information System on 14 February. A "Gulf of America Day" proclamation was signed on 9 February.
A basin far older than either name
Whatever it is called, the Gulf is one of the largest semi-enclosed seas on Earth. Its basin spans roughly 1.6 million square kilometres (about 620,000 square miles) and holds around 2.4 million cubic kilometres of water. It measures about 1,500 kilometres across at its widest.
It is also deeper than most people picture. The average depth is about 1,615 metres, and the floor drops to somewhere between 3,750 and 4,384 metres in the Sigsbee Deep, the abyssal plain at the centre of the basin — the dark grey region in the map above. Around it lie the Sigsbee Knolls, domes pushed up from beneath by a buried layer of Jurassic salt that has been slowly deforming for well over a hundred million years.
The basin began to open as Pangaea rifted apart in the Late Triassic and Jurassic, flooding, evaporating and reflooding as it went. That evaporation left the Louann Salt, and the salt is why the Gulf is one of the world's great petroleum provinces: rising salt domes trap hydrocarbons against their flanks. Federal offshore production in the Gulf supplies roughly 14% of total US crude oil output. Around 27,000 abandoned wells sit on the seafloor.
Three countries hold coast on it. The American shore runs about 2,700 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida; Mexico's runs about 2,200 kilometres across six states from Tamaulipas to Yucatán; Cuba closes the south-eastern corner. Two channels connect it to the wider ocean — the Yucatán Channel in the south and the Straits of Florida in the east — which is what makes it a semi-enclosed sea rather than a bight, and what gives its circulation the distinctive shape described below.
The two shores are geologically unalike in a way that shows up on the map above. The northern margin is a drowned river delta system, soft and shallow, built from sediment the Mississippi has been dumping for millions of years. The eastern and southern margins are carbonate platforms — the Florida Platform and the Yucatán Platform — limestone shelves that drop off abruptly. That is why the Florida and Yucatán shelf edges appear as sharp lines on bathymetric charts while the Louisiana shelf fades out gradually.
The Loop Current, and why the Atlantic starts here
Water enters the Gulf from the Caribbean through the Yucatán Channel, swings north in a warm arc called the Loop Current, and exits through the Straits of Florida — where it becomes the Gulf Stream. Every calorie the Gulf Stream carries to north-west Europe passes through this basin first.
The Loop Current is also the Gulf's hurricane problem. It carries deep warm water, not just a warm surface skin, so a storm crossing it cannot cool itself by churning up colder water from below. That is the mechanism behind several of the basin's most explosive rapid-intensification events.
At the other end of the water column sits a problem of a different kind. The Mississippi drains about 41% of the contiguous United States into the northern Gulf, carrying agricultural nitrogen and phosphorus with it. The resulting summer hypoxic zone off Louisiana and Texas roughly doubled in size between 1985 and 2008 and reached its largest recorded extent, about 22,730 square kilometres, in 2017. Meanwhile the Gulf still yields more fish, shrimp and shellfish annually than the south Atlantic, mid-Atlantic, Chesapeake and New England regions combined.
Where "Mexico" in Gulf of Mexico came from
A common assumption is that the Gulf was named after the modern country. The sequence runs the other way. The name derives from Mēxihco, the Nahuatl name of the Mexica heartland around Tenochtitlan, and appeared on European charts from around the 1550s — nearly three centuries before Mexico existed as an independent state. The country and the gulf both take their name from the same Nahuatl root.
That gives the older name a documented run of roughly 470 years and formal recognition by the International Hydrographic Organization. It also explains why a 2006 proposal to rename the Gulf was rejected unanimously by the US Board on Geographic Names: the board's standing policy discourages changes to long-established names without a compelling reason. Our guide to why Mexico is called Mexico follows the same root in the other direction.
The twelve-nautical-mile argument
Mexico's objection was legal rather than sentimental. President Claudia Sheinbaum's position was that American sovereignty over the sea extends 12 nautical miles from the coast — the territorial sea under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — and that naming authority cannot reach further than sovereignty does. Beyond that limit lies the exclusive economic zone, which confers resource rights out to 200 nautical miles but not sovereignty over the water itself.
Her first response to the proposal was to suggest, pointedly, that North America be renamed "América Mexicana." She later sued Google in Mexican courts over the label; the case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. The United Kingdom declined to recognise the new name, citing established usage.
The underlying tension is real but narrow. Nothing stops a country naming things in its own records. What no country can do is compel the name outward — a limit that applies equally to the 2026 renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America.
The paperwork, which is where it becomes concrete
The most tangible effect of the order is in American federal publications, and it is thorough. The National Weather Service issues marine text forecasts by zone for the Gulf of America. The National Hurricane Center publishes an Offshore Waters Forecast under that heading. NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information now distributes a "Gulf of America Regional Climatology." NOAA's Office of Coast Survey has reissued educational chart material with the name. USGS applications, including the GNIS search tool, return Gulf of America.
For anyone working with American federal data, that is the practical consequence: two names now index the same basin depending on the publication date and the publisher, which is a nuisance for time series that span February 2025.
What map users see, and where
Google explained its rule in a blog post at the time: it follows the official national names database of the user's country. American users see Gulf of America; users in Mexico see Gulf of Mexico; users everywhere else see "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)." Apple Maps and Bing adopted similar location-dependent labelling. MapQuest declined to change.
News organisations split. The Associated Press kept the original name in its stylebook while noting the new one — a decision that led the White House to bar AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One, and led AP to sue. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction on 8 April 2025 restoring the agency's access.
Public opinion never moved much. A Marquette University poll in February 2025 found 71% opposed and 29% in favour; other February polling put opposition between 58% and 72%. A House bill codifying the name passed narrowly on 8 May 2025 and went no further in the Senate.
What the episode settled, then, is that a country's naming reach and its territorial reach are the same size — and that in an era of location-aware maps, "the name of a place" is no longer a single value. Your phone now serves you a different label for the same water depending on which SIM is in it.
The basin is indifferent to all of it. For the physical geography — currents, depths, coastline and the hurricane season the whole region plans around — see our Gulf of Mexico guide, and for how naming decisions like this one get made in the first place, who decides what places are called.