The Arctic’s warming hotspot is turning oddly Atlantic
The Barents Sea is a shallow Arctic Ocean shelf—average depth about 230 metres—shared by Norway and Russia off their northern coasts, once called the Murman Sea and renamed for Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz. Fisheries and hydrocarbons thrive where Atlantic water now pushes north.
The Barents Sea is bounded by the Kola Peninsula to the south, the drop-off to the Norwegian Sea on the west, Svalbard to the north-west, Franz Josef Land to the north-east and Novaya Zemlya to the east. Novaya Zemlya, a continuation of the northern Urals, walls it off from the Kara Sea, and its coasts shed most of their ice around 10,000 years ago. The International Hydrographic Organization fixes the western edge on a line from Spitsbergen through Bear Island to Norway's North Cape and the southern edge at the mouth of the White Sea. Being shallow, it supports major fisheries and oil and gas exploration.
Three kinds of water meet here. Warm, salty Atlantic water above 3 °C arrives with the North Atlantic Drift; cold, fresher Arctic water below 0 °C comes from the north; and warm but less salty coastal water hugs the shore. Where Atlantic and polar water collide they form the Polar Front. Near Bear Island the sea-floor shape pins that front in place year after year, but towards Novaya Zemlya it blurs and wanders.
The Atlantic influence keeps the southern half, including Murmansk in Russia and Vardø in Norway, free of ice all year, and by September the whole sea is more or less open. Finland briefly had a stake too: from 1920 to 1944 its territory reached the coast, and Liinakhamari in the Pechengsky district was its only winter port without ice until it passed to the Soviet Union.
Scientists describe the sea as becoming Atlantified, because it is the Arctic's fastest-warming hot spot. Warming has shrunk sea ice and weakened the layering of the water column, shifts that could alter Eurasian weather. One forecast holds that as open water spreads, extra evaporation will feed heavier winter snow across much of continental Europe.
Source: Barents Sea
