Arctic Ocean

Assembled from 37 blocks · 2 evidence · 53 related

1. Story
2. An ocean basin almost entirely enclosed by land: Eurasia, North America and Greenland ring it, and it connects to the rest of the world ocean through the wide Fram Strait, the shallow Bering Strait and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It is the smallest and shallowest of the ocean basins, commonly given as about 14 million square kilometres with a mean depth of roughly 1,200 m, and a large fraction of that area is continental shelf - the Siberian shelves are among the broadest on Earth. The enclosure is the fact that governs everything else about the place: land animals can walk to the ice, rivers deliver an enormous freshwater load that stratifies the surface layer and helps ice form, and eight sovereign states hold coastlines on it. It is a frozen sea, not a frozen continent.
3. Knowledge
4. Arctic Ocean
5. Antarctica
6. Connections
7. Antarctica
8. Arctic Amplification
9. Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus)
10. Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea)
11. Arctic Council
12. Inuit
13. The continuous satellite sea-ice record begins
14. The Arctic summer minimum drops far below anything previously observed
15. The lowest Arctic sea-ice extent in the satellite record
16. Seven Arctic states pause participation in the Arctic Council
17. Arctic Ocean
18. Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC)
19. Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
20. Halley Bay Emperor Penguin Colony
21. The Antarctic Treaty (1959)
22. McMurdo Station
23. Vostok Station
24. Cook crosses the Antarctic Circle
25. Antarctica is sighted - by whom is disputed
26. Amundsen reaches the South Pole
27. Scott reaches the South Pole and finds he is second
28. The International Geophysical Year puts twelve nations on the ice at once
29. The Antarctic Treaty is signed at Washington
30. The continuous satellite sea-ice record begins
31. Vostok records minus 89.2 degrees Celsius
32. Antarctic sea ice reaches a record low, a year after the previous one
33. The Madrid Protocol becomes open to a review conference
34. Southern Ocean
35. Evidence
36. A continuous, consistently processed record of sea-ice extent in both hemispheres exists from 1979, from which the Arctic September minima of 2007 (approximately 4.2 million km2) and 2012 (approximately 3.4 million km2) and the Antarctic February minima of 2022 and 2023 (the first below 2 million km2 in the record, and lower again the following year) are drawn. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: nsidc.org was probed during production and refused by the network egress proxy, and the WebSearch budget was exhausted. EVERY NUMERIC VALUE IN THIS RECORD IS APPROXIMATE AND UNCHECKED, given to one or two significant figures for that reason. A curator must replace them with values read from the Sea Ice Index before publication.
37. Observational analysis over 1979-2021 finds Arctic warming close to four times the global mean rate, higher than the two-to-three times commonly quoted previously, with the ratio sensitive to how the Arctic region is defined. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: the paper was not opened during production - no research channel was available. The title, journal and DOI are given from the producer's prior knowledge and must be confirmed before publication; the ratio should not be quoted more precisely than "close to four times" on this basis.