Bering Sea

The Bering Sea is a big part of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It lies between two huge land areas: Eurasia and the Americas. It got its name from Vitus Bering, a Danish-born Russian explorer. In 1728, he was the first European to carefully travel through this sea, sailing from the Pacific Ocean toward the Arctic Ocean.

The Bering Sea is separated from the Gulf of Alaska by the Alaska Peninsula. It covers more than 2,000,000 square kilometers and touches Alaska on the east and northeast, the Russian Far East and the Kamchatka Peninsula on the west, and the Aleutian Islands on the south. To the far north, the Bering Strait links it to the Arctic Ocean.

This sea is home to many plants and animals. It has areas controlled by the United States and Russia, as well as open waters in the middle called the "Donut Hole." The mix of currents, ice, and weather helps create a rich and busy environment for sea life.

History

Many scientists believe that during a time when Earth was very cold, called the last glacial period, the sea level dropped enough for humans to walk from Asia to North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Animals also moved between these areas. This path is known as the Bering land bridge.

The Bering Sea also holds a piece of an old tectonic plate called the Kula plate. In December 2018, a bright meteor exploded above the Bering Sea, creating a big flash of light in the sky.

Geography

The Bering Sea is part of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It lies between two big land areas: Eurasia and the Americas. The sea has deep water areas and shallower parts near the edges of the land.

Islands in the Bering Sea include the Pribilof Islands, Komandorski Islands, St. Lawrence Island, and others. Important areas of the Bering Sea are the Bering Strait, Bristol Bay, Gulf of Anadyr, and Norton Sound.

Ecosystem

The Bering Sea has two main things that help plants grow there. First, where the shallow parts of the sea drop off into deeper water, called the "Greenbelt", lots of food for tiny plants comes up from the deep. This helps make lots of tiny plants called phytoplankton.

Second, the seasonal sea ice helps too. When the ice melts in spring, it adds fresh water to the sea and creates conditions that help the tiny plants grow even more. The ice also gives a place for tiny plants to live.

Some signs show that big changes may be happening in the Bering Sea. In one very warm summer, a lot of a special kind of tiny plant grew. Studies using old samples from whale skin show that the amount of food the sea can support may have gone down by about a third in the past 50 years.

Biodiversity

The Bering Sea is a rich home for many sea animals. It has many kinds of whales, such as the beluga, humpback whale, bowhead whale, gray whale, and blue whale. There are also other sea animals like walrus, Steller sea lion, northern fur seal, orca, and polar bear.

This sea is very important for seabirds. Over 30 kinds of seabirds, with about 20 million birds, live and raise their young there. Some of these birds are tufted puffins, the endangered short-tailed albatross, spectacled eider, and red-legged kittiwakes. The Bering Sea also has many fish, including Pacific cod, Pacific salmon, and Pacific herring, as well as shellfish like red king crab and snow crab. In total, scientists have found at least 419 different kinds of fish in this sea.

Fisheries

The Bering Sea is famous for its rich and valuable fisheries, including king crab, opilio and tanner crabs, Bristol Bay salmon, pollock, and other fish. These fisheries depend on the Bering Sea's complex food web.

Commercial fishing in the Bering Sea is a very profitable business, supporting some of the world's biggest seafood companies. In the U.S., these fisheries bring in about $1 billion in seafood each year, while Russian fisheries in the Bering Sea are worth around $600 million yearly. The Bering Sea is also the main setting for Alaska's king crab and snow crab seasons, which are featured on the Discovery Channel show Deadliest Catch. Fish and shellfish caught in Alaskan waters make up half of the total U.S. catch.

Change

The Bering Sea's future is uncertain due to changes happening in the Arctic. Between 1979 and 2012, the Bering Sea saw a small increase in sea ice, which is different from the big loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean to the north.

In media

One of the stories in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, called "The White Seal," uses the Bering Sea as the home of a special white fur seal named Kotick.

A movie from 2015 named Harbinger Down follows students who travel on a crabbing boat to watch how global warming affects a group of beluga whales in the Bering Sea.

In the 1949 film Down to the Sea in Ships, one of the main characters is named “Bering” because they were born on a ship crossing the Bering Sea.

The 2002 movie Ghost Ship, directed by Steve Beck, tells the story of a crew in the Bering Sea who find a ship that vanished in 1962.