Pechora Sea

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pechora Sea sits at the southeastern corner of the Barents Sea, pressed against the northwestern edge of European Russia. It is ringed by Kolguyev Island to the west, Vaygach Island and the Yugorsky Peninsula to the east, and the southern end of Novaya Zemlya to the north. Those boundaries enclose something genuinely unusual: an Arctic sea that does not behave like one.

  The sea supports around 600 taxa and holds the highest total biomass in the Barents Sea. Each autumn, one of the largest Atlantic salmon stocks in Northern Europe pushes through its waters to spawn beneath the ice. The Karskaya group of beluga whales winters here. King eiders use it as their principal staging and moulting ground. For a body of water that freezes over from November to June, it sustains a remarkable amount of life.

  How did a relatively shallow Arctic shelf sea become this productive? And what happens to that productivity as climate change tightens its grip on the polar bears and Atlantic walrus that depend on it? The answers lie in the rivers, the sediment, the ice, and in a history stretching back to the year 1032.

• 2. First Crossings

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  In 1032, a Russian explorer named Uleb, sailing out of Veliky Novgorod, made the earliest recorded voyage across the Pechora Sea and through the Yugorsky Strait into the Kara Sea. That crossing was not a casual feat. It meant navigating a body of water sealed by ice for much of the year, with no charts and no precedent.

  The Pechora Sea served as the launchpad for everything east of it. Russian Pomors, the coastal communities who lived along the White Sea shores, had been working the sea and the coast of Novaya Zemlya since the 11th century. Their accumulated knowledge of ice conditions and coastal passages eventually made a formal trade route possible.

  That route, known as the Great Mangazea Route, connected the White Sea with the Ob River and the Yenisei Gulf. It began operating in the latter part of the 16th century, funnelling Siberia's resources westward. By 1619, it was shut down. Russian authorities feared that the route was too open, that European powers might follow it into Siberia. Political caution closed what Arctic endurance had opened.

  There is a telling detail in the sea's own name. Before the Barents Sea was called the Barents Sea, the Pechora Sea already had its name. The rest of what we now call the Barents Sea was then known as the Sea of Murmansk. The Pechora Sea was older in record, older in use, and older in identity.

• 3. Rivers and Shallow Water

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  The Pechora River delivers roughly 130 km3 of freshwater into the sea each year, making it the sea's principal source of inflow. Along with that water comes 4,570 km3 of sediment and 12,500 tonnes of other suspended matter annually. No other single input shapes the sea's character more than this river.

  The Pechora Sea covers around 205,607 km2, but its average depth is only about 50 metres. In the bay, mean depth drops as low as 11 metres; even south of Novaya Zemlya it reaches only 190 metres. The deepest point in the whole sea is 210 metres. That shallowness matters: it prevents the upwelling of nutrients from the Atlantic, which keeps pelagic productivity low.

  Freshwater inflow does something else too. The sea's salinity ranges from 8 to 18 per mille in the bay and climbs to 34 per mille in the central portion, increasing with distance from the Pechora River's mouth. Low salinity encourages ice formation, which in turn stratifies the water column. That stratification, combined with the continental position and the abundance of ice, shapes everything from sediment texture to the distribution of organisms on the seafloor.

  The Pechora Sea and the neighbouring Kara Sea together account for more than a third of the Arctic Ocean's total continental runoff. That proportion is extraordinary by global standards, and it gives this corner of the Arctic Ocean characteristics far more temperate than its latitude would suggest. The Atlantic-influenced Kolguyev Current flows eastward through the central part of the sea, moderating temperature and salinity in ways the land alone cannot.

• 4. A Benthic Sanctuary

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  At the Kara and Yugorsky Straits, the total biomass of bottom-dwelling organisms exceeds 500 mg/m2, the highest figure recorded anywhere in the Barents Sea. That number is not an accident. The Pechora River's nutrient load feeds a benthic ecosystem of unusual richness, supporting more than 600 fauna on the seafloor.

  The most abundant phyla found there are Annelida, Bryozoa, Crustacea, Echinodermata, Mollusca, and Sarcomastigophora. Walruses benefit directly from this abundance, grazing the seafloor in concentrations that the rest of the Barents Sea cannot match.

  The sea also holds 70 fish species. The most abundant is Boreogadus saida, commonly called the polar cod, which plays a central role in the cryopelagic ecosystem, the web of life that links sea ice to open water. Cod fisheries in the Barents Sea as a whole are vital to both Norway and Russia, and the Pechora Sea's contribution to that fish stock connects this remote shelf sea to international fishing economies.

  Among the anadromous fish that use the sea each autumn is one of the largest Atlantic salmon stocks in Northern Europe, Salmo salar. They migrate through the Pechora Sea to spawn, completing the process under the ice. The Pechora estuary also hosts the only Northern European stock of Coregonus autumnalis, a whitefish species, and one of the region's largest populations at that.

• 5. A Flyway Hub

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  The Pechora Sea sits at the centre of the East Atlantic Flyway, the migratory corridor linking Arctic breeding grounds to wintering areas across Europe and Africa. That position makes the sea a critical node for waterbirds far beyond its Arctic neighbourhood.

  King eiders designate the Pechora Sea as their main staging and moulting ground. Long-tailed ducks, scoters, and most other waterfowl species use it as a stopover. The sea functions, in effect, as a refuelling station for millions of birds moving between continents.

  This is possible because the sea's biology supports the density of food those birds require. The benthic ecosystem provides the invertebrate prey that diving ducks depend on. A stopover point is only useful if it can feed the birds that land there, and the Pechora Sea's high benthic biomass does exactly that.

  The Karskaya group of beluga whales arrives in winter, choosing the Pechora Sea as a seasonal habitat rather than passing through. Polar bears in the Barents Sea belong to a genetically distinct population, and their survival is tied to the ice conditions that the sea's continental climate produces. Climate change bears down hardest on animals already adapted to the extremes of Arctic life, and both the polar bears and the Atlantic walrus of the Barents Sea are counted among the threatened.

• 6. Oil, Confrontation, and Risk

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  The Pechora Sea is described as one of the most developed places in the Arctic with regard to petroleum exploration. The Dolginskoye and Prirazlomnoye oil fields are both active sites of drilling within the sea.

  In September 2013, Greenpeace activists approached and attempted to scale a Gazprom drilling platform in the sea. The Russian Coast Guard intervened in what became a confrontation that drew international attention. Both Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have stated that Gazprom is not prepared to deal adequately with a spill associated with oil production in these waters.

  The concern is not abstract. The sea's shallowness means that a spill would spread across a seafloor ecosystem already documented as the most biomass-rich in the Barents Sea. The 600 benthic taxa, the salmon runs, the beluga wintering grounds, the king eider moulting habitat: all sit within the footprint of an oil industry that the sea's historically low level of human interference did nothing to prepare for. Walruses and other species are specifically named as threatened by possible pollution.

  The Pechora River's 130 km3 annual discharge means any contaminant entering the sea's hydrological system would be redistributed across more than 205,000 km2. The 2013 confrontation between Greenpeace and the Russian Coast Guard put that tension in front of a global audience, but the underlying question of whether industrial infrastructure and Arctic ecology can coexist in the Pechora Sea remains open.