Question: What is the most surprising thing you have discovered about the ocean?

Yueng Lenn answered on 26 Jun 2020:

The most recent thing that surprised us was that Atlantic water that flows into the Arctic Ocean is having a real impact on the sea ice there. The reason this was surprising is because the Atlantic Water has always flowed into the Arctic, but had not, until the last 15 years or so, really made any long-standing changes to where you would find the sea ice in winter. What we found was that the Atlantic water was getting gradually warmer but that only from 2005 onwards did we find that the sea ice stayed north of a certain ocean front in the north Barents Sea, even in winter. So something changed to push this whole system into a new normal.