An Arctic sea that thaws for only two months
The Kara Sea, a shelf of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, spans roughly 1,450 by 970 kilometres and about 880,000 square kilometres, yet stays ice-bound for all but two months. Ports such as Novy Port and Dikson still matter for fishing and undeveloped petroleum.
Westward, the Kara Strait and Novaya Zemlya separate it from the Barents Sea; eastward, Severnaya Zemlya divides it from the Laptev Sea. Its northern line runs from Cape Kohlsaat on Graham Bell Island in Franz Josef Land to Cape Molotov, the tip of Komsomolets Island. Mean depth is only about 110 metres, so winter ice and summer river flood dominate the water column.
From May through August, freshwater runoff near 1,200 cubic kilometres a year from the Ob, Yenisei, Pyasina, Pur, and Taz reshapes circulation, while Barents inflow swings from about 0.6 Sv in August to 2.6 Sv in December. Unlike many Arctic margins, islands such as the Arkticheskiy Institut group, Lonely Island, and Wiese Island sit in open water; the Nordenskiöld Archipelago alone holds over ninety islands. Only Ushakov Island among them stays glaciated.
Nenets speakers link the name to hummocked ice, or Turkic kara for black, via the Kara River into Baydaratskaya Bay. Sixteenth-century maps called it Oceanus Scythicus or Mare Glaciale; Stephen Borough failed at its entrance in 1556, and Nordenskiöld’s Vega finally forced the Northeast Passage after crossing here in 1878. Russians pushed in earlier than that: in 1736–1737 Admiral Stepan Malygin took two ships, the Perviy and the Vtoroy, across the sea to the mouth of the Ob and charted a coastline almost nobody had described.
After 1917 the Northern Sea Route drove a boom in polar stations, from five at the revolution to 24 by 1932, roughly 80 by 1948 and more than 100 by the 1970s. The icebreaker Sadko combed the unmapped north in 1935 and 1936 and turned up tiny Ushakov Island, while in summer 1942 German warships and U-boats raided Soviet shipping in Operation Wunderland, only to be thwarted by floes and fog. Today the East-Prinovozemelsky field extends West Siberian oil geology offshore, while dumped Soviet nuclear waste keeps radiological concerns alive beside the Great Arctic State Nature Reserve founded in 1993.
Source: Kara Sea
