The Norwegian-Greenland Sea

Abstract Generation of oceanic crust at the boundary between the Greenland/North American and the northwestern part of the Eurasian plates has created the Norwegian-Greenland Sea. This relatively young ocean comprises a number of separate basins, plateaus, and ridges revealing that the break-up and separation of the two major plates have not, in geological terms, been a simple process. In this context we define the Norwegian-Greenland Sea as the deep ocean between Europe and Greenland, bounded in the south by the Greenland-Iceland-Faeroe shallow transverse and in the north by the Spitsbergen Fracture Zone (Fig. 1). Geographically, the term Greenland Sea has been used for the ocean between Svalbard and northeast Greenland, but here we have adopted the geologically accepted usage in which it relates to the deep ocean between the Greenland-Senja and Spitsbergen fracture zones. Passive continental margins consisting of well-developed shelves and slopes separate the Norwegian-Greenland Sea from the adjacent continental masses of Greenland, Svalbard and Fennoscandia. The two adjacent shallow seas, the North Sea and the Barents Sea were, prior to the formation of the deep ocean in early Cenozoic time, part of a much larger contiguous epicontinental sea between the continental masses. The scientific exploration of the deep ocean, which started late in the last century, was until the 1950s focused on physical oceanography and marine biology. It was not before the mid-1960s that systematic research programs in marine geology and geophysics were initiated. These investigations were pioneered by regional surveys carried out by Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory