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Arctic Ocean
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The Arctic Ocean is the world's smallest, with an areal extent of 13,900,000 km2, yet it contains the widest of all continental shelves, extending 1,210 km from the coastline at some sites off Siberia. The central basin has a mean depth of 3,700 m and is divided by three submarine ridges. The Arctic Ocean is nearly landlocked by Greenland, Canada, Norway, Alaska, and Russia, and the central portion is ice-covered throughout the year. Its primary inflow occurs through the Fram Strait between Greenland and Spitzbergen (Svalbard), with important inflow ... occurring through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia and across the Barents Sea shelf. The Bering Sea receives water from the Gulf of Alaska through the Aleutian Island chain, and the Chukchi Sea receives water through the Bering Strait. Outflow from the Arctic Ocean occurs primarily through the Greenland Sea into the Atlantic Ocean and forms the East
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The Arctic Ocean is an ocean that is between Europe, Asia, North America and the North Pole. It is mostly in what is called the Arctic Circle. Its area is about 14.056 million square kilometers. In the winter it is dark and has clear skies, and in the summer the weather is damp and foggy with rain and snow. The ocean's water is covered by a polar icepack that is 3-4 meters thick with ice ridges that may be three times that thickness. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by open seas during the summer, but the ice doubles in size during the winter.
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The Arctic Ocean has the widest continental shelf of all the oceans; it extends c.750 mi (1,210 km) seaward from Siberia. From the shelf rise numerous islands, including the Arctic Archipelago, Novaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, and Wrangel Island. The continental shelf encloses a deep oval basin (average depth 12,000 ft/3,658 m) that stretches between Svalbard and Alaska; E of Greenland the ring of the continental shelf is broken by the Greenland Sea. The greatest depth (17,850 ft/5,441 m) in the Arctic Ocean is found just N of the Chukchi Sea. Since the Arctic’s connection with the Pacific Ocean is narrow and very shallow, its principal exchange of water is with the Atlantic Ocean through the Greenland Sea. Even there, though surface waters communicate freely and a strong subsurface current brings warm water from the Atlantic into the Arctic basin, exchange of deeper waters is barred by submarine ridges.
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The Arctic Ocean has relatively little plantlife except for Phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are a crucial part of the ocean and there are massive amounts of them in the Arctic. This is because during summer, the sun is out day and night... enabling the phytoplankton to photosynthesize for long periods of time and reproduce quickly. Phytoplankton can also reproduce by splitting themselves. Nutrients from the gulfstream and currents wash into the ocean too, making it the ocean with the most diverse wildlife.
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-- Miles beneath the 3-foot ice packs of the Arctic Ocean, biologist Tim Shank got his first-ever glimpse of the sea floor. It looked nothing like what he thought. "We're miles below the surface and it's completely different than what we expected, because we saw lava formations that you'd see on Hawaii or on mid-ocean ridges that erupted eight to 10 years ago," said Shank, who was part of an international team of scientists who took part in a summer expedition to the Arctic. "This again proves that we know so little about our deep ocean." The team, led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists, was able to record images from an ocean region cut off from all other ecosystems for more than 20 million years. Although researchers could not complete the main objective of discovering deep-sea hydrothermal vents, scientists said they may have found new species of microbes, sponges and unexpected evidence of recent underwater volcanic activity.
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The Arctic Ocean is ... the area where the effect of climate change appears to be expressed the strongest. The already ongoing changes make the effort to identify the diversity of life in the major three realms (sea ice, water column and sea floor) an urgent issue. Changes in the environmental conditions will have direct effects on the marine biota on multiple levels, from populations to individuals. Species level information is, therefore, essential to discussions about climate change or anthropogenic impact, their expressions and effects. These effects can only be detected through long-term monitoring of key species, communities and processes. For monitoring and assessment of changes, the availability of baseline data is crucial.
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Arctic Ocean