• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.51-62
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• 2001

The Arctic consists of numerous sedimentary basins containing voluminous natural resources and two of the world's major oil and gas producing areas. The western Siberia Basin in the Arctic region has the largest petroliferous province with an area of 800 ${\times}$ 1,200 km and produces more than 60% of total Russian oil production. The North Slope of Alaska produces about 20% of the U.S. output, i.e., 11% of the total U.S. consumption. Being small compared to those regions, the Canadian Northwest Territories and the Pechora Basin in Russia produce only fair amount of oil and natural gas. There are also many promising areas in the northern continental shelf of Russia. In addition to Russia, Svalbard and Greenland have been investigated for oil and gas. Gas hydrates are widespread in both permafrost regions and arctic continental shelf areas. The reserves of gas hydrates in the Arctic Ocean are about 20${\sim}$32% of total estimated amounts of gas hydrates in the world ocean. Mineral mining is well developed, especially in Russia. The major centers are located around the Kuznetsk Basin and Noril'sk. They are major suppliers of gold, tin, nickel, copper, platinum, cobalt, iron ore, coal as well as apatite. There are also some minings of lead-zinc in Alaska and Arctic Canada.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• v.2
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• pp.1019-1022
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• 2006

Satellite sea ice data from 1978 to the present reveal that the perennial ice (or ice that survives the summer) has been rapidly declining at almost 10% per decade. Warming due to increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is now also being reflected in winter with drastic reductions in the maximum extent observed in 2005 and 2006. The retreat of the perennial ice also exposes more open water and has revealed an asymmetric distribution of chlorophyll a pigment concentration in the Arctic basin. Phytoplankton blooms are most dominant at high latitudes, partly on account of sea ice, but in the Arctic basin, it appears that pigment concentrations in the Eastern (Laptev Sea) Region are on the average three times higher than those in the Western (Beaufort Sea) Region. Such asymmetry suggests that despite favorable conditions provided by the melt of sea ice, there are other factors that affects the productivity of the region. The asymmetry is likely associated with much wider shelf areas in the East than in the West, with sea ice processes that inhibits the availability of nutrients near the surface in deep water regions, and river run-off that affects nutrient availability. The primary productivity in the pan-Arctic region have been estimated using the pigment concentrations and PAR derived from SeaWiFS data and the results show large seasonal as well as interannual variability during the 1998 to 2005 period. The data points towards increasing productivity for later years but with only 9 years of data it is too early to tell the overall effect of the sea ice retreat.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.89-102
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• 2023

Climate and environmental changes in the Arctic Ocean due to global warming have been linked to extreme climate change in mid-latitude regions, including the Korean Peninsula, requiring a better understanding of the Arctic climate system based on the paleo-analog. This review introduces three paleoenvironmental research cases using neodymium isotopes (¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd, ε_Nd) measured on two different fractions of marine sediments: silicate-bound 'detrital' and Fe-Mn oxide-dominated 'authigenic' fractions. In the first case, detrital ε_Nd in core HH17-1085-GC on the continental shelf off northern Svalbard was used for tracing changes in sediment provenance and associated glacier behavior over the last 16.3 ka. The second case showed the potential use of authigenic ε_Nd as a quasi-conservative water mass tracer. Three prominent ε_Nd peaks and troughs observed in core PS72/410-1 from the Mendeleev Ridge in the western Arctic Ocean over the past 76 ka suggested episodic meltwater discharge events during 51~46, 39~35 and 21~13 ka BP. The last case proposed the use of the difference between authigenic and detrital ε_Nd as a proxy for reconstructing glacier fluctuation. The idea is based on the assumption that enhanced glacial erosion during glacier advances can supply sufficient freshly-exposed rock substrate for incongruent weathering, potentially leading to greater isotopic decoupling between bedrock and dissolved weathering products as recorded in detrital and authigenic ε_Nd, respectively. Thus, it would be worthwhile to take advantage of sedimentary ε_Nd to improve our understanding of past environmental changes in polar regions.

• 연구논문집
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• s.28
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• pp.111-121
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• 1998

Offshore of Sakhalin Island is one of potential oil and gas development fields in Russia. American and Japanese companies are actively participating in the developments. They plan to export the produced oil and gas to East Asia including Korea, Japan and China. So far, offshore oil and gas field developments are mainly concentrated in the Russian Arctic area such as Barents Sea, Kara Sea and Tinman-Pechora Sea. In this article, the projects under development on the Sakhalin Shelf are reviewed and the environmental conditions in this area are summarized. At the end, the future prospects of the Sakhalin developments are reviewed.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.17-24
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• 2018

Grounding line of a glacier or ice shelf where ice bottom meets the ocean is sensitive to changes in the polar environment. Recent rapid changes of grounding lines have been observed especially in southwestern Antarctica due to global warming. In this study, ERS-1/2 and Sentinel-1A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image were interferometrically acquired in 1996 and 2015, respectively, to monitor the movement of the grounding line in the western part of Ronne Ice Shelf near the Antarctic peninsula. Double-Differential Interferometric SAR (DDInSAR) technique was applied to remove gravitational flow signal to detect grounding line from the interferometric phase due to the vertical displacement of the tide. The result showed that ERS-1/2 grounding lines are almost consistent with those from Rignot et al. (2011) which used the similar dataset, confirming the credibility of the data processing. The comparison of ERS-1/2 and Sentinle-1A DDInSAR images showed a grounding line retreat of $1.0{\pm}0.1km$ from 1996 to 2015. It is also proved that the grounding lines based on the 2004 MODIS Mosaic of Antarctica (MOA) images and digital elevation model searching for ice plain near coastal area (Scambos et al., 2017), is not accurate enough especially where there is a ice plain with no tidal motion.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2023

In this study, we explore the morphological and geochemical characteristics for 440 manganese nodules collected from two different water depths [ARA12B-St52 (150 m, n = 239) and ARA12B-St58i (73 m, n = 201)] on the continental shelf of the East Siberian Sea from the ARA12B expedition in 2021. We also discussed the variations in the characteristics of manganese nodules with varying water depths in the Arctic Sea. The sizes of the nodules are generally greater than 3 cm at both sites. However, there is an obvious difference in the morphology with water depths. For the nodules collected at 150 m, brown-black colored tabular, tube, and ellipsoidal shapes with a rough surface texture are dominant. On the other hand, yellow-brown tabular shapes with a smooth surface texture are common for the nodules collected at 73 m. Furthermore, the slope of trend line between size and weight is significantly different at both sites: particularly, the slopes of nodules at 150 and 73 m are 1.60 and 0.84, respectively. This indicates the difference in the internal structure, porosity, and constituting elements between both nodules. Micro X-ray Flourescence (µ-XRF) results clearly demonstrate that the internal textures and chemical compositions are different with water depths. The nodules at 150 m are composed of a thick Mn-layer and a thin Fe-layer centered on the nucleus, while the nodules at 73 m are alternately grown with thin Mn- and Fe- layers around the nucleus. The average chemical compositions obtained by µ-XRF are 40.6 wt% Mn, 5.2 wt% Fe, and 7.9 Mn/Fe ratio at 150 m, and 10.3 wt% Mn, 19.0 wt% Fe, and 0.6 Mn/Fe ratio at 73 m. The chemical compositions of the nodules at 150 m are similar to those of nodules from the Peru Basin in the Pacific Ocean, while the compositions of the nodules at 73 m are similar to those of nodules from the Cook Islands or the Baltic Sea. The observed morphological and geochemical characteristics of the nodules show a clear difference at the two sites, which indicates that the aqueous conditions and formation processes of the nodules in the Arctic Sea vary with the water depths.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.7
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• pp.718-728
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• 2013

Analysis of scenarios of transportation oil and gas which produced in the Arctic and others cold seas shows that in the near-term there will be a significant increase of tonnage of tankers for oil and gas and number of ships which should be exploited in difficult ice conditions. For the construction of ice-resistant structures (IRS) intended for production of oil and gas and transportation of these products at ice-class vessels, calculating the load from ice to board the ship and on surface of supports of the platforms are the actuality and urgent tasks. These tasks have one basis in both cases: at beginning of the contact occurs fracture of edge of ice, then occurs compressing of rubble shattered of ice, then they extruding from contact area, after this next layer of ice begin to destruct. At calculating the strength of plating and elements construct of vessels, icebreakers and ice-resistant platforms the specific energy of mechanical destruction ice ${\epsilon}_{cr}$ is an important parameter. For the whole period of study of physical and mechanical characteristics of sea ice have been not many experimental studies various researchers to obtain numerical values of this energetic characteristic of the strength of ice by a method called Ball Drop Test. This study shows that the destruction of the ice from dynamic loading in zone of contact occurs in several cycles, and the ice destructed with a minimum numerical values of ${\epsilon}_{cr}$. The author offer this energy characteristic to take as a base value for the calculation of ice load on ships and offshore structures.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.35 no.6_1
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• pp.933-944
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• 2019

This study analyzes the tide deformation of land boundary regions on the east (Region A) and west (Region B) sides of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica using Double-Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DDInSAR). A total of seven Sentinel-1A SAR images acquired in 2015-2016 were used to estimate the accuracy of tide prediction model and Young's modulus of ice shelf. First, we compared the Ross Sea Height-based Tidal Inverse (Ross_Inv) model, which is a representative tide prediction model for the Antarctic Ross Sea, with the tide deformation of the ice shelf extracted from the DDInSAR image. The accuracy was analyzed as 3.86 cm in the east region of Ross Ice Shelf and it was confirmed that the inverse barometric pressure effect must be corrected in the tide model. However, in the east, it is confirmed that the tide model may be inaccurate because a large error occurs even after correction of the atmospheric effect. In addition, the Young's modulus of the ice was calculated on the basis of the one-dimensional elastic beam model showing the correlation between the width of the hinge zone where the tide strain occurs and the ice thickness. For this purpose, the grounding line is defined as the line where the displacement caused by the tide appears in the DDInSAR image, and the hinge line is defined as the line to have the local maximum/minimum deformation, and the hinge zone as the area between the two lines. According to the one-dimensional elastic beam model assuming a semi-infinite plane, the width of the hinge region is directly proportional to the 0.75 power of the ice thickness. The width of the hinge zone was measured in the area where the ground line and the hinge line were close to the straight line shown in DDInSAR. The linear regression analysis with the 0.75 power of BEDMAP2 ice thickness estimated the Young's modulus of 1.77±0.73 GPa in the east and west of the Ross Ice Shelf. In this way, more accurate Young's modulus can be estimated by accumulating Sentinel-1 images in the future.

• Korean Journal of Mineralogy and Petrology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.15-29
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• 2021

In the Arctic Ocean, the distribution of sea ice and ice sheets changes as climate changes. Because the distribution of ice cover influences the mineral composition of marine sediments, studying marine sediments transported by sea ice or iceberg is very important to understand the global climate change. This study analyzes marine sediment samples collected from the Arctic Ocean and infers the provenance of the sediments to reconstruct the paleoenvironment changes of the western Arctic. The analyzed samples include four gravity cores collected from the Araon mound in the Chukchi Plateau and one gravity core collected from the slope between the Araon mounds. The core sediments were brown, gray, and greenish gray, each of which corresponds to the characteristic color of sediments deposited during the interglacial/glacial cycle in the western Arctic Ocean. We divide the core sediments into three units based on the analysis of bulk mineral composition, clay mineral composition, and Ice Rafted Debris (IRD) as well as comparison with previous study results. Unit 3 sediments, deposited during the last glacial maximum, were transported by sea ice and currents after the sediments of the Kolyma and Indigirka Rivers were deposited on the continental shelf of the East Siberian Sea. Unit 2 sediments, deposited during the deglacial period, were from the Kolyma and Indigirka Rivers flowing into the East Siberian Sea as well as from the Mackenzie River and the Canadian Archipelago flowing into the Beaufort Sea. Unit 2 sediments also contained an extensive amount of IRD, which originated from the melted Laurentide Ice Sheet. During the interglacial stage, fine-grained sediments of Unit 1 were transported by sea ice and currents from Northern Canada and the East Siberian Sea, but coarse-grained sediments were derived by sea ice from the Canadian Archipelago.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.6_2
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• pp.1165-1178
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• 2018

Collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf and its flow velocity changes has the potential to reduce the restraining stress to the seaward flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which can cause sea level rising. In this study, variations in ice velocity from 2000 to 2017 for the Nansen Ice Shelf in East Antarctica that experienced a large-scale collapse in April 2016 were analyzed using Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images. To extract ice velocity, image matching based on orientation correlation was applied to the image pairs of blue, green, red, near-infrared, panchromatic, and the first principal component image of the Landsat multispectral data, from which the results were combined. The Landsat multispectral image matching produced reliable ice velocities for at least 14% wider area on the Nansen Ice Shelf than for the case of using single band (i.e., panchromatic) image matching. The ice velocities derived from the Landsat multispectral image matching have the error of $2.1m\;a^{-1}$ compared to the in situ Global Positioning System (GPS) observation data. The region adjacent to the Drygalski Ice Tongue showed the fastest increase in ice velocity between 2000 and 2017. The ice velocity along the central flow line of the Nansen Ice Shelf was stable before 2010 (${\sim}228m\;a^{-1}$). In 2011-2012, when a rift began to develop near the ice front, the ice flow was accelerated (${\sim}255m\;a^{-1}$) but the velocity was only about 11% faster than 2010. Since 2014, the massive rift had been fully developed, and the ice velocity of the upper region of the rift slightly decreased (${\sim}225m\;a^{-1}$) and stabilized. This means that the development of the rift and the resulting collapse of the ice front had little effect on the ice velocity of the Nansen Ice Shelf.