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Scientists studying one of the fastest-warming regions of the global ocean say changes in this region are so sudden and vast that in effect, it will soon be another limb of the Atlantic, rather than a characteristically icy Arctic sea.

The northern Barents Sea, to the north of Scandinavia and east of the remote archipelago of Svalbard, has warmed extremely rapidly – by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) just since the year 2000 – standing out even in the fastest warming part of the globe, the Arctic.

“We call it the Arctic warming hotspot,” says Sigrid Lind, a researcher with the Institute of Marine Research in Tromso, Norway.

Now Ms Lind and her colleagues have shown, based on temperature and salinity measurements taken on summer research cruises, that this warming is being accompanied by a stark change of character, as the Atlantic Ocean is in effect taking over the region and converting it into a very different entity.

Their results were published this week in Nature Climate Change by Ms Lind and two colleagues at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research and University of Bergen. And they underscore that the divide between the Atlantic and the Arctic is not just a geographical one – it’s physical in nature…….

The result, the study says, has been a “dramatic shift in the water column structure in recent years.” Arctic surface waters, with a temperature below freezing, are “now almost entirely gone.”

“This region is shifting to the Atlantic climate, and it’s going fast,” says Ms Lind.

The precipitating event for these changes, the new study finds, is that floating ice is no longer being supplied as regularly to the Barents Sea region from higher Arctic climes………https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/arctic-shifting-atlantic-ocean-sea-climate-change-a8418736.html