Arctic Ocean

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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.