What are 5 facts about Arctic Ocean?
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| Arctic Ocean |
The Arctic Ocean, located mostly in the northern Arctic Polar Region, is the smallest and shallowest of the five major world oceans.
The Arctic Ocean and Arctic Sea Marginal Seas--the Chukchi, East Siberian, Laptev, Kara, Barents, White, Greenland, and Beaufort, as well as, according to some oceanographers, the Bering and Norway--are the least known basins and bodies of water in the worlds oceans because of their remoteness, harsh weather, and permanent or seasonal ice coverage.
The temperature and salinity of the Arctic Ocean change from season to season, with the melting and freezing of ice cover; it has the lowest average salinity among the top five seas, because of its lower evaporation, and confined outlet into the global ocean, and high inflows of freshwater.
The low saline levels in the Arctic Ocean are due to the regular freezing and melting, and to large amounts of freshwater flowing from Canadian and Siberian rivers, including the Mackenzie River (Canadas longest), Ob River (the 7th-longest river in the world), the Lena, and Yenisei.
The freshwater from Canadian and Siberian rivers mainly floated over denser, saltier seawater.
Where the Pacific ocean is located? From here
Below the top of the ocean is a cool layer of freshwater, followed by a deeper layer of warmer, saltier water that is transported from the Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean by ocean currents.
During summer months, the water is flowing freely around the ice; in the winter, ice thickness doubles, even reaching land near the Arctic.
Little marine life exists in places where the sea surface is covered by ice all year round.
As the Pacific and Atlantic waters swirl around the Arctic, they are mixed in with the rest of the Arctic ocean masses, becoming cooler and cooler, losing more heat to sea ice, as well as to the atmosphere above.
Warmer temperatures in the North American Polar Region could result in more meltwater entering the North Atlantic freshwater, potentially perturbing global ocean current patterns.
Dense, deep-water exports from the Arctic Ocean are replaced with surface-flows from Atlantic and Pacific waters, which assure this swapping between tropical and subtropical latitudes, as well as the poles, continues as a gigantic conveyor belt.
In the Western Arctic, the Pacific waters flow northward through the low-lying Bering Strait separating Alaska from Siberia.
The Arctic Ocean contains an important choke point at the southern end of the Chukchi Sea, providing Northern access to the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait between North America and Russia.
The Pacific Ocean is over 13 times larger than the Arctic, but the smallest ocean on earth is also 5,440,000 square miles (14 million square kilometers), with a shoreline of 28,203 miles (45,389 kilometers), making the Arctic almost 1.5 times larger than the United States.
The ARCTIC is the smallest and shallowest of Earths five oceans, taking up 4 percent of world ocean space, and surrounding the North Pole, the most northerly place on the planet.
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