Physical
A vertical zone of rapid change in seawater temperature.
What is a thermocline?
A measure of the acidity of a fluid.
What is pH?
Wegener's theory to explain the shape of the continents.
What is continental drift?
The small unicellular plants that drift with the currents.
What are phytoplankton?
The largest oilspill in US coastal waters, which occurred in April 2010.
What is the Deepwater Horizon spill?
A semienclosed water body where seawater is diluted with fresh water.
What is an estuary?
The sharing of an electron by the nuclei of two atoms.
What is a covalent bond?
The type of tectonic margins associated with earthquakes, Benioff zones, volcanos, and island arcs.
What are active or subductive continental margins?
The small pelagic animals that drift with the currents.
What are zooplankton?
The effect of elevated carbon dioxide on seawater chemistry that is harming corals and other calcium carbonate producing organisms.
What is ocean acidification?
A vertical zone of rapidly change in seawater density.
What is the pycnocline?
Positively charged ions.
What are cations?
The zones of seafloor spreading at the base of the oceans that girds the earth like the stitches on a baseball.
What are mid-oceanic ridges?
The animals that live associated with the seafloor or on rock surfaces.
What is the benthos?
Copper and PCBs are the persistent toxic chemicals that have contaminated the sediments and animals in this Massachusetts Harbor.
What is New Bedford Harbor?
The upward movement of deeper water usually as the result of wind stress.
What is upwelling?
The acronym for polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons.
What is a PAH?
The hopping and skipping movement of sediment particles driven by currents or waves.
What is bedload transport (or saltation)?
The organisms that construct large calcium carbonate reefs in many tropical coastal zones.
What are corals?
The nickname for John Martin's proposed method to reduce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by stimulating massive phytoplankton blooms by dumping iron in the ocean.
What is the geritol solution?
The force that imparts a deflection of currents or wind to the right in the Northern hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere.
What is the Coriolis effect (or force)?
106 Carbons to 16 Nitrogen to 1 Phosphorus
What is the Redfield ratio?
The soft sediments composed largely of diatoms.
What are siliceous oozes?
The largest habitat type on earth, inhabited by a low density but incredibly rich diversity of sediment-dwelling organisms.
What are the benthic abyssal plains?
The benthic polychaete worm that is used worldwide as a pollution indicator.
What is Capitella?