Fram Strait’s Greenland Sea once grew an ice tongue called Odden
The Greenland Sea sits between Greenland and Svalbard, opening north through Fram Strait to the Arctic Ocean and south toward the Norwegian Sea and Iceland. Arctic winds keep temperatures rarely above freezing, and it once grew the Odden ice tongue east of the main East Greenland pack.
Hydrographers fence the basin from Spitsbergen’s northern tip across to Greenland, down Spitsbergen’s west coast, via Jan Mayen to Iceland’s Gerpir, then from Straumnes to Cape Nansen and up Greenland’s northeast shore. Fram Strait opens north; Denmark Strait and Iceland close the south. Depths hit 4,846 metres inside the basin and more than 5,500 metres in Molloy Deep. Silts fill hollows while gravel coats ridges.
Odden—Norwegian for headland—was a winter ice finger up to about 1,300 kilometres long and 330,000 square kilometres, fed by cold Jan Mayen Current water near 72–74°N while wind drove older floes south. West Ice north of Iceland between Greenland and Jan Mayen remains a classic harp- and hooded-seal nursery. Fog, northerlies, and drifting bergs squeeze navigation: ice season stretches from October into August. Three ice types matter—multi-metre Arctic pack, metre-scale sea ice, and freshwater bergs.
Russian voyages under Admiral Chichagov in 1765–66, working from Lomonosov’s program, logged early soundings and ice drift. Spitsbergen-based industrial whaling lasted three centuries until about 1911 emptied the grounds; Inuit hunting shows in fifteenth-century archaeology. Cold East Greenland Current filaments and warm Spitsbergen Current water mix here, a hinge in Atlantic overturning. Air can plunge near −49 °C by Spitsbergen in winter or reach 25 °C off Greenland in summer, yet surface averages stay near freezing—an Arctic corridor that still meters ice and fog toward Europe.
Source: Greenland Sea
