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The Arctic Ocean Was Invaded by Its Neighbor Earlier Than Anyone Thought - The New York Times
Nov 27, 2021 1 min, 25 secs
Long ago, the two oceans existed in harmony, with warm and salty Atlantic waters gently flowing into the Arctic.

The layered nature of the Arctic — sea ice on top, cool freshwater in the middle and warm, salty water at the bottom — helped hold the boundary between the polar ocean and the warmer Atlantic.

But everything changed when the larger ocean began flowing faster than the polar ocean could accommodate, weakening the distinction between the layers and transforming Arctic waters into something closer to the Atlantic.

This process, called Atlantification, is part of the reason the Arctic is warming faster than any other ocean.

But this early Atlantification did not appear in existing historical climate models, a discrepancy that the authors say may reveal gaps in those estimates.

“Information on long-term past changes in Arctic Ocean hydrography are needed, and long overdue,” Dr.

In 2017, the researchers extracted a sediment core from the seafloor of Kongsfjorden, a glacial fjord in the east end of the Fram Strait, a gateway between the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard and Greenland, where Arctic and Atlantic waters mingle.

The team’s original idea was to reconstruct the oceanographic conditions of a region that contained both Arctic and Atlantic waters, going back 1,000 to 2,000 years.

When the researchers compared the data from their paleoclimate model with others to see if they overlapped, they found existing climate models had no sign of this early Atlantification.

Lenn, who was not involved with the research, sees a difference between this early Atlantification and the present, rapid Atlantification, which is largely driven by melting Arctic sea ice.

In another possibility, earlier natural warming may have made the Arctic Ocean much more sensitive to the accelerated Atlantification of recent decades.

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