Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chukchi Sea is a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean, bounded on the west by the Long Strait off Wrangel Island and on the east by Point Barrow, Alaska. Its southernmost limit is the Bering Strait, which connects it to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The Chukchi are the indigenous people of the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia, who traditionally fished, hunted walrus, and pursued whales along the sea's shores. Norwegian polar explorer Harald Sverdrup proposed separating this body of water from the East Siberian Sea in 1928, and it was named after the Chukchi people; the name was officially approved in 1935.
The Soviet steamer Chelyuskin became trapped in Chukchi Sea ice in 1933 and sank on the 13th of February 1934 near Kolyuchin Island after drifting for over two months. All 104 surviving crew and passengers established a camp on the sea ice and were evacuated by the Soviet government in a celebrated aerial rescue.
Two large cyst beds of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium catenella, covering a combined 145,600 square kilometers, lie in Ledyard Bay and Barrow Canyon in the Chukchi Sea. When these cysts germinate, the organisms produce saxitoxin, which causes paralytic shellfish poisoning in people who eat contaminated seafood; climate change has advanced bloom initiation by three weeks over the past two decades.
The Chukchi Shelf is estimated to hold oil and gas reserves as high as 30 billion barrels. In February 2008, winning bidders paid a combined 2.6 billion dollars at a U.S. government auction for extraction rights, though Shell Oil ended its drilling program in September 2015.
The Chukchi Sea is navigable for only about four months of the year due to sea ice. It covers approximately 595,000 square kilometers, and depths shallower than 50 meters account for 56 percent of its total area.