Winter in the Arctic Ocean

What goes on under the Arctic Ocean ice cover in the winter? This question lately has occupied the minds and talents of scientists with heightened urgency. The reason for this special curiosity is that arctic oil and gas exploration will necessarily be most intense during the nine-month period of frozen sea ice in the nearshore Beaufort. Mostly used to working on marine problems in open water, scientists and management personnel both have realized that arctic oil and gas leasing offshore in the Beaufort Sea would force industry to operate mainly in winter when the water is ice-covered.

About one year ago, scientists began to wonder about the "big void" they had never looked into: the arctic marine winter. Dogma said that all biological events are at a standstill under arctic winter conditions. Common sense and Eskimo knowledge said certain scientific observations indicated otherwise. Scientists with the University of Alaska and with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program effort now realize that some of the most biologically critical events of the annual cycle routinely take place in the dead of winter in North America's arctic waters:

•Arctic Cod spawn between November and February under the arctic ice. These fish are important because they are near the base of the marine food chain leading up to seals, Polar Bears, and man.

•Mysids also spawn or produce eggs between November and February under the ice every year. They are small shrimp-like animals that are food for many predators in the nearshore Beaufort.

•Ice algae and phytoplankton associated with ice contribute their big pulse of carbon and nutrients long before the winter sea ice breaks up.

•Kelp in the Stefansson Sound Boulder Patch puts on its annual growth spurt in the dead of winter.

All of these biological processes shake the illusions of non-Alaskan scientists that nothing serious can be going on in the "dead of winter." All these processes of reproduction, growth, and survival in winter are requiring special consideration by government and industry now that oil and gas leasing is about to take place in the arctic.