49 Fun Facts About Arctic Ocean

How does the Arctic rank among the world's five oceans by size?

Smallest. It is still about one and a half times the size of the United States, but because it is also the shallowest ocean it holds little more than 1 per cent of the world's seawater.

North of the Arctic Circle, what happens on at least one day every summer?

The sun never sets. The Arctic Circle is drawn where this midnight sun lasts a single day, and the effect grows northward until, at the Pole itself, daylight lasts about six months.

Which sea's name do some oceanographers borrow for the nearly landlocked Arctic Ocean, calling it the 'Arctic ___ Sea'?

Mediterranean. To oceanographers a mediterranean sea is any basin almost enclosed by land that swaps little water with the wider ocean, which is why the label is also given to the Arctic.

What is the main prey of polar bears hunting on the Arctic sea ice?

Seals. A polar bear will wait beside a breathing hole in the ice to seize a ringed seal as it surfaces, which is why the bears struggle to feed when the sea ice retreats.

Which pole has been drifting for decades from Arctic Canada toward Siberia?

North Magnetic Pole. It wanders tens of kilometres a year as Earth's field shifts, so the magnetic model behind ship, aircraft and phone navigation has to be reissued every five years.

The Arctic is the shallowest ocean because much of its floor is what?

Continental shelf. Off Siberia it runs as far as 1,500 km out to sea, the widest on Earth, which helps hold the Arctic's average depth to about a kilometre against roughly four for the Pacific.

Which slow-swimming shark of Arctic waters is the longest-lived vertebrate known, surviving for centuries?

Greenland shark. Carbon dating of its eye lenses points to a lifespan of at least 250 years, a life so slow that it may not be ready to breed until it is about 150.

Which undersea ridge, named after an 18th-century polymath, splits the deep Arctic basin in two?

Lomonosov Ridge. Rival countries each argue it is an extension of their own landmass, because proving it would win them seabed rights that reach all the way to the North Pole.

Antique harpoon tips found in which Arctic whales suggest they can outlive every other mammal?

Bowhead whale. Studies suggest it can pass 200 years, and it takes its name from the huge bow-shaped skull it uses to smash breathing holes through the sea ice.

What is the name of the great clockwise current that turns in the Arctic Ocean north of Canada?

Beaufort Gyre. It hoards fresh water from rivers and melting ice near the surface, and scientists warn that a sudden release into the Atlantic could cool the climate of Western Europe.

What lets Arctic surface water stay liquid at about -1.8 °C?

Its salt. Dissolved salt lowers the freezing point, and when the sea does freeze the ice crystals leave most of the salt behind, so sea ice can be melted down for drinking water.

Arctic sea ice usually shrinks to its yearly minimum in which month?

September. The ice goes on melting right through the summer and only regrows once the sun sinks, and its yearly peak is just as late, arriving in March instead of midwinter.

What struck the central Arctic weeks before sea ice hit its 2012 record low?

Cyclone. Storms that strong are rare in the Arctic summer, and it broke up the thin ice, though researchers judged that it only hastened a record the ice was already heading for.

Why does losing sea ice make the Arctic warm faster?

Dark seawater absorbs more sunlight. White ice bounces most of it back into space, so every loss feeds the next, and many projections now put a first ice-free summer before 2050.

Since 1979 the Arctic has warmed nearly four times as fast as the globe, a pattern scientists call what?

Arctic amplification. For years the standard line was that the region was warming twice as fast as the planet, until a 2022 study of the satellite era roughly doubled that figure.

Which four great rivers feed the fresh, low-salinity top layer of the Arctic Ocean?

Ob, Yenisei, Lena and Mackenzie. Their fresh water floats on the denser salt water below, forming a lid that stops warmer Atlantic water underneath from rising to melt the sea ice.

Which Arctic whale is nicknamed the 'canary of the sea' for its chirps, whistles and clicks?

Beluga. Calves are born grey and turn white as they mature, and an adult can change the shape of the bulging 'melon' on its forehead to focus the sounds it makes.

Which Greek explorer sailed north around 325 BC and reported a frozen sea beyond a land he called Thule?

Pytheas. His own book is lost, and the later writers who preserve his report often did so to mock it: Strabo dismissed the whole voyage as fiction.

Which persistent 19th-century myth held that warm, ice-free water surrounded the North Pole?

British Admiralty secretary John Barrow promoted expeditions in search of it from 1818 to 1845; it was disproven by the early 1900s.

Who froze his ship into the Arctic pack ice in 1893, hoping to drift to the North Pole?

Fridtjof Nansen. After 18 months in the ice he left the ship with a single companion and got closer to the Pole than anyone before him before turning back.

The polar ship Fram was built with a rounded hull so that squeezing pack ice would do what?

Push it up on top. The smooth hull with almost no keel let the ice lift the ship instead of crushing it, at a price: in heavy seas it rolled more than most ships.

Which submarine made the first transit under the North Pole in 1958?

USS Nautilus. As the world's first nuclear-powered submarine it had no need to come up for air, so it could pass beneath the entire ice cap from the Pacific side and surface in the Atlantic.

British explorer Wally Herbert led the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1968-69, travelling by what?

Dog sled. The 3,800-mile trek to Svalbard took more than a year, because the four men had to sit out a whole polar winter camped on the drifting ice before they could go on.

The first undisputed expedition to reach the North Pole did so in 1926 aboard what?

An airship. The Norge floated over the Pole on a flight from Svalbard to North America, and it ranks as first because the earlier claims of Cook, Peary and Byrd are all doubted.

Robert Peary claimed to reach the North Pole on 6 April 1909 accompanied by four Inuit men and whom?

Matthew Henson. He went north with Peary seven times, yet as a Black American he waited until 1937 to be admitted to the Explorers Club and until 1944 for the expedition's medal.

Which explorer completed the first passage of the Northwest Passage entirely by ship, in 1903-1906?

Roald Amundsen. Where big naval expeditions had failed, he slipped through with a handful of men in a small fishing sloop, the Gjøa, five years before he beat everyone to the South Pole.

Whose Northwest Passage expedition vanished with the ships Erebus and Terror?

John Franklin. None of his men came home, and it took a search sent by his widow, Lady Jane Franklin, to find skeletons and a last written message on King William Island.

Which European airline opened the first scheduled passenger route over the Arctic in 1954, flying from Los Angeles?

Scandinavian Airlines. Its propeller airliners hopped across the top of the world with fuel stops in Winnipeg and Greenland, three years before Pan Am and TWA followed them over the ice.

From 1937, which country began monitoring the Arctic from manned stations on drifting ice floes?

Soviet Union. Its first station was set down beside the Pole in May 1937, and the four men aboard rode their floe south until icebreakers lifted them off the following February.

Which fur-trading company's abandoned steamer drifted crewless around the Arctic for decades?

Hudson's Bay Company. Its steamer Baychimo was given up for lost when it vanished from the pack ice in a blizzard, yet the empty ship kept turning up, the last time in 1969.

The polar bear is the largest living species of what?

Land carnivore. Oddly, the same animal is also classed as a marine mammal, because it spends most of its life out on the sea ice and depends on the ocean for its food.

Dozens of polar bears invading a town forced a 2019 emergency on which Arctic archipelago, a Cold War nuclear test site?

Novaya Zemlya. More than 50 bears gathered around the main settlement and some walked into buildings, but officials refused to license any shooting because the species is protected.

The narwhal's spiral tusk is actually what?

A tooth. It is a canine that grows out through the male's upper lip in a spiral up to 3 metres long, and it may help him sense the water as well as impress or fight rivals.

In ice-covered parts of the central Arctic, which fish is the central predator of tiny zooplankton?

Polar cod. Antifreeze proteins in its blood stop ice crystals forming, so it can live right under the pack ice and turn plankton into food for seabirds and whales.

Which Arctic jellyfish has tentacles reported at over 30 metres?

Lion's mane. Its sting is the surprise solution to a Sherlock Holmes mystery: in 'The Adventure of the Lion's Mane' the apparent murderer turns out to be this jellyfish.

A 2008 US government study put about a fifth of the world's undiscovered what beneath the Arctic?

Oil and natural gas. Most of it is thought to lie offshore, which is why the countries around the ocean are so keen to prove how far out their seabed rights extend.

Ten governments, including the US, China and the EU, agreed to ban which activity in the central Arctic Ocean for 16 years?

Commercial fishing. The ban is a precaution: it gives scientists time to study what lives in those waters before retreating ice lets any fishing fleet reach them.

Svalbard's largest settlement, on the island of Spitsbergen, is called what?

Longyearbyen. The name means 'Longyear town', after John Munro Longyear, an American businessman whose company founded the settlement in 1906 to mine coal.

What keeps the Svalbard Global Seed Vault's seeds frozen if the power fails?

Permafrost. It was meant to make the vault fail-safe, yet in late 2016 unusual warmth and heavy rain sent water pouring into the entrance tunnel; no seeds were lost.

Greenland, the world's largest island, is an autonomous territory of which kingdom?

Denmark. Greenlanders voted for self-government in 2008 and now run their own internal affairs, while Copenhagen still looks after the island's foreign policy and defence.

The Northern Sea Route along Siberia begins at the Kara Sea and ends at which passage in the east?

Bering Strait. The route is the shortest sea link between Europe and East Asia, far shorter than going by Suez, but ice keeps parts of it closed for most of the year.

Murmansk, the largest city north of the Arctic Circle, is a port in which country?

Russia. A warm Atlantic current keeps the harbour free of ice all winter, which is why Allied convoys fought their way to it with war supplies during the Second World War.

The Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, spread east across the Arctic from which region?

Present-day Alaska. Setting out about a thousand years ago, they reached Greenland within a few centuries and replaced the Dorset people who had lived across the region before them.

Canada's decades-long, good-humoured dispute over tiny Hans Island in the Arctic was nicknamed after which drink?

Whisky. Canadian visitors planted a flag and left a bottle of it, their rivals answered with a flag and schnapps, and so it went until the two countries split the island in 2022.

At about 14 million square kilometres, the Arctic Ocean is almost the size of which continent?

Antarctica. The two polar regions are near mirror images: the north is an ocean ringed by continents, the south a continent ringed by ocean, and the two are almost the same size.

Which seabird nests in the Arctic and then flies almost to the opposite pole, the longest migration of any animal?

Arctic tern. Because it breeds in the far north and spends the other half of the year at the far end of the planet, it lives through two summers every year.

Which icebreaker made the first surface ship transit to the North Pole in 1977?

Arktika. Its name is simply the word for 'Arctic', and its nuclear reactors gave it the power to smash through pack ice all the way to a spot only submarines had reached by sea.

Which Ice Age animals survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until about 4,000 years ago?

Woolly mammoths. The island's herd outlasted the mainland ones by thousands of years, so mammoths were still alive when the pharaohs of Egypt were building pyramids.

Which word for a slim one-person boat came into English from the Inuit hunters of the Arctic?

Kayak. Hunters stretched animal skins over a frame of driftwood or bone and wore a jacket tied tight around the cockpit rim, so a boat that rolled over could be righted without taking on water.