Russian oceanologists from the PP Institute of Oceanology Shirshov RAS in Moscow have revealed how seasonal desalination cycles of the Kara and other Arctic seas function along the Northern Sea Route. This was reported to socialbites.ca by the press service of the Russian Science Foundation, which supported this research.
For most of the year, the Kara Sea receives large amounts of fresh water from Russia’s largest rivers, the Ob and Yenisei. They create a desalination zone in the water area with an area of up to 250 thousand square kilometers. But at the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, the flow of the river disappears somewhere and the sea becomes salty again. Salt concentration is an important parameter affecting the strength of ice in the Northern Sea Route.
As scientists discovered, fresh water from the Ob and Yenisei is carried by currents to the neighboring Laptev Sea. As a result, by January the central part of the Kara Sea regains its salinity. The discovery was made thanks to large-scale studies on water parameters using measuring probes during the spring-winter seasons from 2021 to 2023. Oceanologists worked on icebreakers and a floating station anchored in the Vilkitsky Strait between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea.
“Thanks to the Earth’s rotation, the low-density desalinated waters beneath the ice form a strong current along the coast and are transported eastward into the Laptev Sea. Due to this process, already in January the surface layer in the central part of the Kara Sea becomes salty again,” explained the head of the study, leading researcher of the PP Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and principal investigator of the Russian Academy of Sciences MIPT, Alexander Osadchiev to socialbites.ca.
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