The Arctic Ocean is an important link in the global hydrological cycle, storing freshwater and releasing it to the North Atlantic Ocean in a variable fashion as pack ice and freshened seawater. An unknown fraction of this return flow passes through Nares Strait between northern Canada and Greenland. Surveys of...
Upper ocean hydrography in the central Arctic Ocean
has relaxed since 2000 to near-climatological conditions
that pertained before the dramatic changes of the 1990s. The
behavior of the anomalies of temperature and salinity in the
central Arctic Ocean follow a first-order linear response to
the AO with time constant of...
Dissolved barium (Ba) was measured along transects across Fram and Denmark Straits as part of the 1998 ARK-XIV/2 Polarstern expedition. Results are combined with other available tracer observations to analyze water mass composition at Fram Strait. A combination of Pacific water and Eurasian river runoff dominated (>80% and >10% of...
We present a decade-long (1981–1990) high-resolution (subseasonal) record of Pb and Cd concentrations and Pb isotopic composition in a series of 119 snow samples from a 6-m snow pit at Summit, Greenland. Both metals show order of magnitude seasonal variability, with maxima in spring of every year, coinciding with sulfate...
In 2002, oxygen isotope ratios of water (H2
18O/H2
16O), dissolved barium, and salinity were
measured in surface waters around northern North America to identify freshwater sources and to
provide a large-scale background for interpretation of regional inputs and processes. Oxygen isotope
ratios showed that precipitation, river runoff, and sea...
Hydrographic and tracer data from 2002 illustrate Atlantic water pathways and
variability in the Mendeleev Ridge and Chukchi Borderland (CBLMR) region of the
Arctic Ocean. Thermohaline double diffusive intrusions (zigzags) dominate both the Fram
Strait (FSBW) and Barents Sea Branch Waters (BSBW) in the region. We show that
details of...
Distributions of temperature, salinity, and barium in near-surface waters (depth ≤ 50 m) of the Laptev Sea and adjacent areas of the Arctic Ocean are presented for the summers of 1993, 1995, and 1996. The tracer data indicate that while fluvial discharge was largely confined to the shelf region of...
Pacific winter waters, a major source of nutrients and buoyancy to the Arctic Ocean, are thought to ventilate the Arctic's lower halocline either by injection (isopycnal or penetrative) of cold saline shelf waters, or by cooling and freshening Atlantic waters upwelled onto the shelf. Although ventilation at salinity (S) >...
During SHEBA, thin ice and freshening of the Arctic Ocean surface in the Beafort Sea led to speculation that perennial sea ice was disappearing [McPhee et al., 1998]. Since 1987, we have collected salinity, δ¹⁸O and Ba profiles near the initial SHEBA site and, in 1997, we ran a section...
A comprehensive, joint Soviet-American study of the chemistry of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest (1,632 m) lake, was carried out in July 1988. In this paper, we report the major, minor, and preliminary trace element concentrations for three profiles obtained at or near the deepest and central part of the...