ABSTRACT
The sesonally ice-covered Barents Sea and the Bering Seas are home for some of the world’s largest commercial fisheries. The Barents Sea and Bering Shelf ecosystems are chronically unbalanced because of the ever-present fluctuations in the marine climate at high latitudes. Winter surface nutrient concentrations in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific are about twice those of the Barents Sea and the Northeast Atlantic; Only Antarctic values are higher. Food web diagrams have been constructed both for the Barents Sea and the Bering Shelf. In the Polar Domain of the Barents Sea, the ice edge bloom is the only major phytoplankton event and appears to trail the ice edge as it retreats northwards, consuming the ‘new’ nutrients that become accessible. In the Bering Sea, the partly bottom-water dwelling Alaskan, or walleye, pollock is by far the most important finfish, possibly making up half of the groundfish biomass there.
