Laptev sea system discussed at Russian‐German Workshop

The Laptev Sea covers the central part of the vast Arctic shelf seas off northern Eurasia. It receives large volumes of fresh water from the Lena River and other big rivers that drain the central part of Siberia; peak runoff occurs in the early summer. Being tucked away between two groups of islands—Severnaya Zemlya in the west and the New Siberian Islands in the east—and connected to the Kara Sea in the west and the East Siberian Sea in the east only through relatively narrow straits, the Laptev Sea is an important area for sea‐ice formation in the Arctic Ocean [ Rigor and Colony , 1997; Kassens et al. , 1999]. Through sea ice formation, the Laptev Sea influences the ice cover of the central Arctic Ocean and its Transpolar Drift, which exports sea ice into the western Norwegian‐Greenland Sea. The Laptev Sea is also the central segment of the Northern Sea Route. For this reason, commercial interests wish to gain valuable knowledge about the extremes of its modern environment, past variability and predictability on time scales of months and years. Both in the Laptev Sea and on the adjacent land regions, large tracts of subterraneous and submarine permafrost have been observed as a consequence of the extreme paleoclimate of the latest geological past.