Islands of the Arctic Ocean
The Arctic Ocean is the smallest of the Earth's five oceans, with an area of some 14 million km². Located almost entirely within the Arctic Circle the Arctic Ocean's southern margins are ringed by the landmasses of North America, Asia and Greenland — in effect creating a nearly land-locked ocean. Its only connection with the Pacific Ocean is via the narrow Bering Strait, and with the Atlantic Ocean via the larger Davis Strait and Labrador Sea (between Greenland and northeastern Canada) and the Greenland and Barents seas (between Greenland and the northeastern Atlantic).
The margins of the Arctic Ocean include several major bodies of water, including: Baffin Bay, the Barents Sea, the Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, the East Siberian Sea, the Greenland Sea, Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea and the White Sea. Much of the central region of the Arctic Ocean is permanently frozen. In the winter season of continual darkness the Arctic ice pack can extend to twice its size — freezing marginal seas, bays and rivers deep into the continental landmasses of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia.
Although the open waters of the Arctic Ocean are almost completely devoid of islands, its margins and shelf edges contain thousands of islands and islets grouped into several great archipelagoes such as the Arctic Archipelago of northern Canada and the chain of mostly Russian-owned island groups that rings its southern fringes off northern Eurasia, stretching from Svalbard in the west to Wrangel Island in the east.
The Arctic Ocean contains some of the world's largest islands, including the 2,166,086 km² Greenland, the world's largest island. Other major islands include Baffin Island (the 5th largest), Victoria Island (9th largest) and Ellesmere Island (10th largest).
The islands of the Russian Arctic are located within a vast region, wholly located within the Arctic Circle, stretching from the Arctic coast of European Russia in the west and along the northern coasts of central and far-eastern Siberia in the east — from the Barents Sea to the Chukchi Sea. There are a four large groups of islands: the Franz Josef Land archipelago (16,134 km²), Severnaya Zemlya (38,800 km²), Novaya Zemlya (90,650 km²) and the New Siberian Islands (29,000 km²). In addition, there are a few large solitary islands such as Wrangel Island, Vaygach and Kolguyev. There are also numerous small islands and island groups located just off the mainland coast, especially in the region of the Ob-Yenisey estuaries and along the coast of the Taymyr Peninsula.
Much of the continental shelf in the area that lies off the northern coast of Siberia comprises the broad expanse of the Siberian Shelf — the widest on Earth — that extends northwards for up to 1,500 km. It contains several extremely shallow seas with average depths of around 100 m. Their waters contain large volumes of freshwater — water that is received from some of the Earth's largest rivers, such as the Yenisey, Ob, Irtysh and Lena. Their low salinities and high latitudes mean that these arctic marginal seas are often the first to freeze as winter approaches and can remain frozen deep in to the brief Arctic summer — particularly in the east.