On the East Greenland Shelf, downwelling-favorable northerly winds confine the freshest water masses to the inner shelf, creating a strong cross-shelf salinity gradient. This wedge of fresh water supports a southward East Greenland Coastal Current (EGCC) that flows continuously from Fram Strait (80°N) to Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland (60°N). What happens to this freshwater as it rounds Cape Farewell is not well understood. Here, we present results from a Lagrangian experiment in which we deployed 50 Surface Velocity Program (SVP) drifters and 8 profiling floats in the EGCC on the southeast Greenland shelf in August/September 2021 and 2022. The SVP drifters were drogued at 15 m and the profiling floats drifted at 100 m for 6 hours and profiled to the surface every 6 hours. We find that the vast majority of the EGCC continues on the shelf around Cape Farewell and supplies the northward West Greenland Coastal Current (WGCC). Local winds exert strong control on the coastal current’s cross-shelf position, but there is little evidence of shelf-basin exchange there. Investigation of the winds during the deployments revealed that they were similar to the mean conditions, and thus our instruments likely captured the typical ocean circulation. However, the lack of sampling during a strong Greenland tip jet event leaves open the possibility that the shelf-basin exchange in this region is intermittent in response to large wind events.

Export from the Arctic and meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet together form a southward-flowing coastal current along the East Greenland shelf. This current transports enough fresh water to substantially alter the large-scale circulation of the North Atlantic, yet the coastal current’s origin and fate are poorly known due to our lack of knowledge concerning its north-south connectivity. Here, we demonstrate how the current negotiates the complex topography of Denmark Strait using in situ data and output from an ocean circulation model. We determine that the coastal current north of the strait supplies half of the transport to the coastal current south of the strait, while the other half is sourced from offshore via the shelfbreak jet, with little input from the Greenland Ice Sheet. These results indicate that there is a continuous pathway for Arctic-sourced fresh water along the entire East Greenland shelf from Fram Strait to Cape Farewell.