In the Arctic, winter sea ice extends over an area of approximately 15 million km2 at its peak in March and up to 7 million km2 in September, at the end of the summer melt season. Corresponding numbers for the Southern Ocean around the Antarctic continent are approximately 3 million km2 in February during the Antarctic summer and 18 million km2 at the height of winter in September. In regions with seasonal sea ice, the ice cover achieves a thickn...

There are major regional differences for the Arctic sea ice, with the strongest decline in ice extent observed for the Greenland Sea (10.6 per cent per decade). The smallest decreases of annual mean sea ice extent were found in the Arctic Ocean, the Canadian Archipelago and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the marginal Arctic seas off Siberia (the Kara, Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi Seas) a slight negative, but not significant, trend in ice exten...

Fisheries catches increasingly originate from deep areas. Over the years due to depletion in fish stocks the fishing industry has resorted to fishing at greater depths and increasing the damage to fish stocks and the ocean floor.

Marine systems are the world’s oceans. For mapping purposes, the map shows ocean areas where the depth is greater than 50 meters. Global fishery catches from marine systems peaked in the late 1980s and are now declining despite increasing fishing effort.

Primary ocean productivity, as measured in grammes of carbon per square meter, from remote sensing imagery outlines the areas with rich marine life. These areas are characterised by an abundance of marine life and they provide natural resources in terms of fisheries and harvesting of these resources. The map is a part of a set, presenting different natural resources, with a focus on developing countries, and the use of natural resources for econo...

The Republic of Fiji is a small island country in the South Pacific Ocean. The country has a population of 850 000 people spread out over an archipelago of islands. The largest ones, Viti Levu and Vanua Leva houses the majority of the inhabitants.

Mass-balance estimates for Greenland show thickening at high elevations since the early 1990s at rates that increased to about 4 cm per year after 2000, consistent with expectations of increasing snowfall in a warming climate. However, this mass gain is far exceeded by losses associated with large increases in thinning of the ice sheet near the coast. Total loss from the ice sheet more than doubled, from a few tens of billions of tonnes per year ...

Antarctica represents a very unique and special case on our planet. With the richness of the Southern Ocean, the coasts and the Southern islands have relatively high biodiversity and biomass in the form of numerous sea birds - such as penguins and mammals such as seals and sea lions - primarily around the Antarctic peninsula - in the Marielandia Arctic Tundra ecoregion. In contrast - the inland of the Antarctic continent are a cold, windy and inh...

Scientists are just beginning to learn about the many species in the remote, deep waters of the polar oceans. Corals, for example, are not limited to the warm, shallow waters of the tropics. They also exist in many cold, deep waters all over the world, including Arctic and sub-Antarctic waters. Coral reefs are marine ridges or mounds, which have formed over millennia as a result of the deposition of calcium carbonate by living organisms, predomin...

The land mass in the Arctic - Greenland and parts of Canada, Alaska, Russia and the Nordic countries - surrounds the Arctic Ocean. In the low Arctic, down to the temperate regions, the taiga coniferous forests represents a vast band of deep forests. North of the taiga, the tundra of the Arctic - with low vegetation, shrubs and various degrees of permafrosts spreads out. Beyond the tundra, there might be barren regions with only rock and few plant...

Fisheries, together with tourism, represents a major economic activity around Antarctica. In the old days whales were hunted for oil - these days fish and krill are captured for fish meal and human consumption. The areas in the Southern Atlantic are vastly more productive, and this is where most of the fish is caught. The top fishing vessels hail from Japan, Ukraine and Poland. Worth mentioning is that these figures are still small compared to th...

The global ocean circulation system will change under the strong influence of arctic warming.

The Arctic Ocean connections are changing

Left panel: Schematic of the Arctic Ocean, central basin (Canada and Eurasian basins) and arctic continental shelves (with approximate boundaries for each Arctic Ocean coastal sea), and major rivers draining into the region. Right panel: The three generic types of continental shelves (i.e., inflow, interior and outflow) are shown

The Arctic Ocean experiences much less exchange with the atmosphere than other oceans; momentum exchange (wind drag), heat exchange and freshwater exchange are limited due to the sea ice cover.

Initially, meltwater was assumed to be the prime cause of glacier acceleration, making its way to the ground beneath ice sheets, lubricating it and causing the glaciers to flow more quickly to the sea.

Consistent with the rapid retreat of sea ice, the surface waters of the Arctic Ocean have been warming in recent years, because declining sea-ice cover allows the water to absorb more heat from the sun.

Atmosphere-ocean exchanges of carbon.

At the regional, ocean basin scale, the area between the insulating sea-ice cover and the open ocean (known as the ice margin) is characterized by particularly strong temperature gradients during winter, favoring the development of low pressure systems along the edge of the ice, as well as smaller, intense features known as polar lows that present hazards to shipping.

Polar cod (Boreogadus saida) was found to be sensitive to the warming scenarios and the model predicted that it would be extirpated in most of its range even under the milder warming scenario. This is due to its occurrence in the Arctic Ocean, which largely precludes it from moving northwards. Polar cod was predicted to be extirpated around Greenland and its abundance was largely reduced in other parts of the Arctic Ocean after 30 years of hypot...