Until only a few years ago, the Arctic Ocean was considered to be a quiet, unproductive backwater, hardly changing or causing change in the oceans to the south. This mistaken view was due partly to the sparse-ness of observations in the interior ocean, inaccessible because of the ice, but there seems also to be a consensus emerging that a change has recently occurred in the Arctic Ocean's circulation. A layer of water that derives from the Atlantic is warming up, and the exchange between the Arctic Ocean's two major basins — Canadian and Eurasian — has somehow altered. At the Ocean Sciences meeting in February, a special session organized by K. Aagaard (Univ. Washington) illustrated a coincidence in the arrival of change and the availability of some extraordinary tools to observe it. The use of icebreakers and submarines in the past few years, starting with the cruise of the Polarstern in 1987, combined with data from deep-sea moorings, have not only changed our perceptions of the Arctic Ocean but have also allowed us to see change occur. Icebreakers have created a time series of high-quality geochemical and biological sections through the ocean across regions of permanent ice cover, and submarines have produced large-scale, synoptic surveys undreamed of a decade ago.
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