The Enigmatic Depths: Exploring the Secrets of the Arctic Ocean

by Hy-Zier Joans

The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the World's five oceanic divisions. It spans an area of approximately 5,430,000 square miles (14,060,000 square kilometers) and is the coldest of the World's oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea, an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, or 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 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 (NSIDC) 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 (coverage). In September 2012 the Arctic ice extent reached a new record minimum. Compared to the average extent 1979–2000 the sea ice had diminished by 49%.

Human habitation in the North American polar region goes back at least 17,000 to 50,000 years during the Wisconsin glaciation. At this time, 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. 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, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik, northern Quebec, Labrador, and Greenland.

The few expeditions to penetrate beyond the Arctic Circle in that era added only small islands such as Novaya Zemlya in the 11th century, and Spitzbergen in 1596. Since these were often surrounded by pack-ice, their northern limits were not so clear. The makers of navigational charts more conservative than some. The more fanciful cartographers tended to leave the region blank with only fragments of known coastline sketched in.

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 1850 and 1860 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 1883. 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.

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. 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 kilometers 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.

For a more in depth look at the race for the North Pole, check out this video!