Bering Sea

The Bering Sea is the frigid, fog-bound water that fills the gap between Siberia and Alaska, a place where two continents very nearly touch. Across the shallow Bering Strait at its northern edge, the first humans are thought to have walked into the Americas when Ice Age seas were lower and the seabed lay exposed as a land bridge. Today it is one of the most productive fishing grounds on Earth and one of the stormiest, where some of the planet's most dangerous commercial fishing takes place.

At roughly 2.3 million square kilometres, the Bering Sea is split between a vast, shallow continental shelf in its northeast and a deep abyssal basin in the southwest that drops to about 4,097 metres. The Aleutian Islands arc across its southern rim, separating it from the open Pacific and channelling cold, nutrient-laden currents that fuel enormous plankton blooms. Seasonal sea ice spreads across the northern shelf each winter and retreats in summer, a rhythm that governs the entire ecosystem and is now shifting as the Arctic warms.

Named for the Danish navigator Vitus Bering, who charted these waters for Russia in the 1700s, the sea was long the hunting ground of Indigenous Yupik and Aleut peoples and later of Russian fur traders pursuing sea otters to near extinction. It carried the boundary set when the United States bought Alaska in 1867. Today its pollock and crab fisheries are among the largest on the planet, sustaining global seafood markets while scientists track the climate-driven retreat of its defining ice.

• North America
  The third-largest continent, from the Arctic to the tropics borders
• Arctic Ocean
  The smallest and shallowest ocean, capped by sea ice connects to
• Pacific Ocean
  Earth's largest and deepest ocean drains to
• Asia
  Earth's largest and most populous continent located on