The bottom of the Arctic Ocean

In March 1948, a high-latitude expedition was asked to explore the depths and the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Researchers landed on an ice floe near the Novosibirsk islands. Despite the severe frost, hydrologists Ya. Gakkel and V. Timofeev immediately made the first measurement of the depth of The Arctic Ocean. The automatic winch counter showed 2750 m. After a few hours of drift, a second measurement was made. But what is this? The depth suddenly decreased by more than 400 m. The depth also continued to decrease. On the tenth day of drift, the researchers found the bottom of the Arctic at a depth of 1290 m, that is, almost 1500 m higher than at the first measurement.

In March 1948, a high-latitude expedition was asked to explore the depths and the bottom of the Arctic Ocean

Scientists were extremely surprised, because by that time on all special maps the bottom of the Arctic Ocean was depicted in the form of a cup-shaped depression with depths over 4000 m. The authors of these maps came from measurements of the ocean depth made back in 1893-1895. known expedition F. Nansen on the ship "Fram" and later - the Soviet polar expedition to the drifting station "North Pole-1" and the expedition on the icebreaker "George Sedov." But these expeditions made measurements of depths in several days and therefore could not accurately depict the bottom of the Arctic.

Daily measurements of the depths revealed that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in this part has a high underwater ridge, which stretches for many kilometers. He was named after the great Russian scientist, the founder of Russian oceanography MV Lomonosov, who first expressed the idea of raising the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. In 1954, the Lomonosov Ridge was mapped. Studies conducted by teams of scientific drifting stations "North Pole" showed that the Lomonosov Ridge has a fairly significant height above the bottom of the Arctic Ocean (over 3 km) and stretches from the Novosibirsk Islands slightly south of the North Pole to the shores of the Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The length of the ridge is approximately 1800 km, that is almost equal to the length of Ural Mountains.

After that, a whole mountainous country was discovered on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. One of the largest ridges was named after another Russian scientist DI Mendeleyev. As it turned out, the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is dissected by a system of huge underwater ridges to a huge number of depressions up to 4 km deep. A little later, in the vicinity of the pole from a depth of approximately 3000 m, the researchers raised the shattered pebbles, an irrefutable argument that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean had once risen above the ocean.

Now, on the basis of these studies, the scientist J. Ya. Gakkel put forward a hypothesis about the continent Arctide, which once existed on the site of the Arctic Ocean. This explains the similarity of the geological structure of the Asian and American coasts to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, the similarity of their plant and animal kingdom, and the like. As established, part of the ocean between Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land, as well as the Norwegian and Greenland Seas originated simultaneously about 70 million years ago.

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