Arctic Ocean
In the summer months, sea ice from the Arctic drifts through Fram Strait into the Atlantic. Thanks to meltwater, a stable layer forms around the drifting ice atop the more salty seawater [...] team of researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has now determined with the aid of the FRAM ocean observation system. Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Arctic Ocean
The sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean reached its annual minimum of 4.81 million square kilometres on 12 September 2021. As such, the 2021 Arctic sea-ice minimum comes in at 12th place

funded by JPI Oceans and will create new knowledge and improve our mechanistic understanding of the sources, transport, occurrence, and fate of small microplastics from European waters to the Arctic. The consortium

Arctic Ocean
The influx of warmer water masses from the North Atlantic into the European marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean plays a significant role in the marked decrease in sea-ice growth, especially [...] evident a year later, when the ice has drifted towards Greenland via the North Pole and leaves the Arctic through Fram Strait. This study also includes data from the MOSAiC expedition.

AWI scientist Sinhué Torres-Valdés observed the nutrient chemistry of the Arctic Ocean on an expedition as part of the PEANUTS project (Primary production driven by Escalating Arctic NUTrient fluxeS). The SCRIPPS Institution of Oceanography led the expedition in 2018. The results have now been published in a paper in the journal Nature Communications. The PEANUTS project is funded by the Changing Arctic Ocean Program (CAO).

the scientists could demonstrate that the Arctic Ocean as well as the Nordic Seas did not contain sea-salt in at least two glacial periods. Instead, these oceans were filled with large amounts of freshwater [...] Geosciences
The Arctic Ocean was covered by up to 900 m thick shelf ice and was filled entirely with freshwater at least twice in the last 150,000 years. This surprising finding, reported in the latest

Arctic Ocean
Tiny gypsum crystals can make phytoplankton so heavy that they rapidly sink, hereby transporting large quantities of carbon to the ocean’s depths. Experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute [...] Institute recently observed this phenomenon for the first time in the Arctic. As a result of this massive algal transport, in the future large amounts of nutrients could be lost from the surface waters.

amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. The ice samples from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 [...] patch in the Pacific Ocean, while in turn, the high percentage of paint and nylon particles pointed to the intensified shipping and fishing activities in some parts of the Arctic Ocean. The new study has

seriously impacted the sea-ice cover: in the Russian Arctic (the sector from 30 to 180° East), roughly 1 million square kilometres less of the ocean is covered with ice than in the past seven years.
[...] Sea Ice
The Arctic sea-ice extent is the lowest it’s ever been in July since the beginning of satellite observation. The sea-ice retreat is especially pronounced off the Siberian coast, as a result

Arctic Ocean
This summer the sea-ice cover on the Arctic Ocean shrank to the second-smallest extent since the beginning of satellite observation in 1979. By mid-September it covered only 3.8 million [...] formed in Russia’s marginal seas, and soon melted again when the spring came. Secondly, this year the Arctic has seen extremely high air and water temperatures. Accordingly, heat gnawed away at the ice from