Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2.8.
The Arctic terrestrial drainage (all shaded regions) and its four largest
individual watersheds (darker shading) (courtesy of A. Barrett, NSIDC, Boulder, CO).
Arctic Ocean from the Bering Strait. Note also the clockwise motion of the upper
ocean (and hence the overlying sea ice cover) within and north of the Beaufort Sea,
known as the Beaufort Gyre, and the motion from the Siberian shelves, across the
pole and through the Fram Strait, known as the Transpolar Drift Stream. South
of the Fram Strait, this becomes the East Greenland Current, which extends to a
considerable depth. The temperature maximum layer at about 300-500 m depth
seen in the profiles in
Figure 2.7
manifests the inflow of warm Atlantic-derived
waters. This Atlantic inflow is provided by two branches, one west of Spitzbergen
(the West Spitzbergen Current) and one through the Barents Sea (the Barents Sea
Branch). Atlantic water sinks below the Arctic surface layer in the northern Barents
Sea. The temperature maximum layer is known as the Atlantic Layer. The stronger
temperature maximum in the North Pole example of
Figure 2.7
manifests the stron-
ger influence of Atlantic-derived waters in this area. Note also from
Figure 2.11
how the deep ocean currents in the Arctic Ocean are closely allied with the bottom
topography.
