Arctic Ocean


The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five oceanic divisions. It spans an area of approximately and is the coldest of the world's oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or North Polar Sea. It has also been described as an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing world ocean.
The Arctic Ocean includes the North Pole region in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere and extends south to about 60°N. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by Eurasia and North America, and the borders follow topographic features: the Bering Strait on the Pacific side and the Greenland Scotland Ridge on the Atlantic side. It is mostly covered by sea ice throughout the year and almost completely in winter. The Arctic Ocean's surface temperature and salinity vary seasonally as the ice cover melts and freezes; its salinity is the lowest on average of the five major oceans, due to low evaporation, heavy fresh water inflow from rivers and streams, and limited connection and outflow to surrounding oceanic waters with higher salinities. The summer shrinking of the ice has been quoted at 50%.The US National Snow and Ice Data Center uses satellite data to provide a daily record of Arctic sea ice cover and the rate of melting compared to an average period and specific past years, showing a continuous decline in sea ice extent. In September 2012, the Arctic ice extent reached a new record minimum. Compared to the average extent, the sea ice had diminished by 49%.

History

North America

Human habitation in the North American polar region goes back at least 17,000–50,000 years, during the Wisconsin glaciation. Falling sea levels allowed people to move across the Bering land bridge that joined Siberia to northwestern North America, leading to the Settlement of the Americas.
Early Paleo-Eskimo groups included the Pre-Dorset ; the Saqqaq culture of Greenland ; the Independence I and Independence II cultures of northeastern Canada and Greenland ; and the Groswater of Labrador and Nunavik. The Dorset culture spread across Arctic North America between 500 BC and AD 1500. The Dorset were the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture in the Arctic before the migration east from present-day Alaska of the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit.
The Thule Tradition lasted from about 200 BC to AD 1600, arising around the Bering Strait and later encompassing almost the entire Arctic region of North America. The Thule people were the ancestors of the Inuit, who now live in Alaska, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik, Labrador and Greenland.

Europe

For much of European history, the north polar regions remained largely unexplored and their geography conjectural. Pytheas of Massilia recorded an account of a journey northward in 325 BC, to a land he called "Eschate Thule", where the Sun only set for three hours each day and the water was replaced by a congealed substance "on which one can neither walk nor sail". He was probably describing loose sea ice known today as "growlers" or "bergy bits"; his "Thule" was probably Norway, though the Faroe Islands or Shetland have also been suggested.
Early cartographers were unsure whether to draw the region around the North Pole as land or water. The fervent desire of European merchants for a northern passage, the Northern Sea Route or the Northwest Passage, to "Cathay" caused water to win out, and by 1723 mapmakers such as Johann Homann featured an extensive "Oceanus Septentrionalis" at the northern edge of their charts.
The few expeditions to penetrate much beyond the Arctic Circle in that era added only small islands, such as Novaya Zemlya and Spitzbergen, though, since these were often surrounded by pack-ice, their northern limits were not so clear. The makers of navigational charts, more conservative than some of the more fanciful cartographers, tended to leave the region blank, with only fragments of known coastline sketched in.
File:Map of the Arctic region showing the Northeast Passage, the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage, and bathymetry.png|thumb|upright=1.25|The Arctic region showing the Northeast Passage, the Northern Sea Route within it, and the Northwest Passage via Canadian Inland Waters.

19th century

This lack of knowledge of what lay north of the shifting barrier of ice gave rise to a number of conjectures. In England and other European nations, the myth of an "Open Polar Sea" was persistent. John Barrow, longtime Second Secretary of the British Admiralty, promoted exploration of the region from 1818 to 1845 in search of this.
In the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, the explorers Elisha Kane and Isaac Israel Hayes both claimed to have seen part of this elusive body of water. Even quite late in the century, the eminent authority Matthew Fontaine Maury included a description of the Open Polar Sea in his textbook The Physical Geography of the Sea. Nevertheless, as all the explorers who travelled closer and closer to the pole reported, the polar ice cap is quite thick and persists year-round.
Fridtjof Nansen was the first to make a nautical crossing of the Arctic Ocean, in the Fram Expedition from 1893 to 1896.

20th century

The first surface crossing of the ocean was led by Wally Herbert in 1969, in a dog sled expedition from Alaska to Svalbard, with air support. The first nautical transit of the north pole was made in 1958 by the submarine USS Nautilus, and the first surface nautical transit occurred in 1977 by the icebreaker NS Arktika.
Since 1937, Soviet and Russian manned drifting ice stations have extensively monitored the Arctic Ocean. Scientific settlements were established on the drift ice and carried thousands of kilometres by ice floes.
In World War II, the European region of the Arctic Ocean was heavily contested: the Allied commitment to resupply the Soviet Union via its northern ports was opposed by German naval and air forces.
Since 1954 commercial airlines have flown over the Arctic Ocean.

21st century

In August 2019, US President Donald Trump suggested buying Greenland. He raised the idea firmly in December 2024, saying ownership of Greenland was necessary for the national security and economic interests of the United States. He has said the use of force is not ruled out. In a December 10, 2024, social media post, President-elect Trump referred to the prime minister of Canada as the governor of a purported 51st state. Previously he had said that annexation of Canada might be preferable from a trade point of view. On February 1, 2025, he began a trade war.
During a telephone call with new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on March 28, 2025, Trump raised the idea of Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state and described his view of the advantages of annexation. In various other comments, formal and informal, he has expressed a desire to control Canada's resources and the Canadian Internal Waters of the Arctic, commonly known as the Northwest Passage.

Geography

Size

The Arctic Ocean occupies a roughly circular basin and covers an area of about, almost the size of Antarctica. The coastline is long. It is the only ocean smaller than Russia, which has a land area of.

Surrounding land and exclusive economic zones

The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by the land masses of Eurasia, North America, Greenland, and Iceland.
Note: Some parts of the areas listed in the table are located in the Atlantic Ocean. Other consists of Gulfs, Straits, Channels and other parts without specific names and excludes Exclusive Economic Zones.

Subareas and connections

The Arctic Ocean is connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Bering Strait and to the Atlantic Ocean through the Greenland Sea and Labrador Sea.
The largest seas in the Arctic Ocean:
  1. Barents Sea—
  2. Hudson Bay—
  3. Greenland Sea—
  4. East Siberian Sea—
  5. Kara Sea—
  6. Laptev Sea—
  7. Chukchi Sea—
  8. Beaufort Sea—
  9. Amundsen Gulf—
  10. White Sea—
  11. Pechora Sea—
  12. Lincoln Sea—
  13. Prince Gustaf Adolf Sea
  14. Queen Victoria Sea
  15. Wandel Sea
Different authorities put various marginal seas in either the Arctic Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean, including: Hudson Bay,
Baffin Bay, the Norwegian Sea, and Hudson Strait.

Islands

The main islands and archipelagos in the Arctic Ocean are, from the prime meridian west:
There are several ports and harbours on the Arctic Ocean.
The ocean's Arctic shelf comprises a number of continental shelves, including the Canadian Arctic shelf, underlying the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and the Russian continental shelf, which is sometimes called the "Arctic Shelf" because it is larger. The Russian continental shelf consists of three separate, smaller shelves: the Barents Shelf, Chukchi Sea Shelf and Siberian Shelf. Of these three, the Siberian Shelf is the largest such shelf in the world; it holds large oil and gas reserves. The Chukchi shelf forms the border between Russian and the United States as stated in the USSR–USA Maritime Boundary Agreement. The whole area is subject to international territorial claims.
The Chukchi Plateau extends from the Chukchi Sea Shelf.