[3] Ice floes form due to the large amount of freshwater from the Amur River, lowering the salinity of upper levels, often raising the freezing point of the sea surface.

The distribution and thickness of ice floes depends on many factors: the location, the time of year, water currents, and the sea temperatures.

This heavy water flows east toward the Pacific, carrying oxygen and nutrients, supporting abundant sea life.

[5] With the exception of Hokkaido, one of the Japanese home islands, the sea is surrounded on all sides by territory administered by the Russian Federation.

[8] Russian explorers Vassili Poyarkov (1639) and Ivan Moskvitin (1645) were the first Europeans to visit the Sea of Okhotsk,[9] and probably the island of Sakhalin in the 1640s.

[11] The first and foremost Russian settlement on the shore was the port of Okhotsk, which relinquished commercial supremacy to Ayan in the 1840s.

Mamiya Rinzō and Gennady Nevelskoy determined that Sakhalin was indeed an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait.

Since the Peanut Hole is not in the Russian EEZ, any country could fish there, and some began doing so in large numbers in 1991, catching perhaps as much as one million metric tons of pollock in 1992.

The Russian Federation petitioned the United Nations to declare the Peanut Hole to be part of Russia's continental shelf.

These operations were documented in the 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage.

The Soviet Pacific Fleet used the sea as a ballistic missile submarine bastion,[15] a strategy that Russia continues.

Twenty-nine zones of possible oil and gas accumulation have been identified on the Sea of Okhotsk shelf, which runs along the coast.

[16] On 18 December 2011, the Russian oil drilling rig Kolskaya[17][18] capsized and sank in a storm in the Sea of Okhotsk, some 124 km (77 mi) from Sakhalin island, where it was being towed from Kamchatka.