The Ocean Floor
This gradually sloping end of a continent goes under the ocean and is where the beach is located.
What is the Continental Shelf?
This habitat is where the ocean meets the land, and animals must adapt to survive exposure to air.
What is the Intertidal habitat?
This process occurs when oceans absorb carbon dioxide, decreasing available carbonate and making it difficult for marine life to build shells.
What is Ocean Acidification?
This term describes the highest point of a wave.
What is the Crest?
This term describes a continuous, directed movement of water in the ocean.
What is a Current?
Making up 70% of the seafloor, these are vast, flat seafloor areas.
What are Abyssal Plains?
Meaning "light," this is the top portion of the ocean where plants that perform photosynthesis live.
What is the Photic zone?
When these animals become stressed due to narrow temperature ranges, they expel the symbiotic algae living inside them and become "bleached."
What are Corals (or Coral Reefs)?
This term describes the lowest part of a wave.
What is the Trough?
These are the two main types of ocean currents.
What are Surface currents and Density currents?
Formed when two tectonic plates collide, these are the deepest parts of the ocean.
What are Ocean Trenches?
Located on the ocean floor, this zone is cold, dark, has high pressure, and many animals here eat material that sinks from above.
What is the Benthic habitat?
Trash or agricultural runoff are examples of this type of pollution, which comes from a variety of places making the source harder to identify.
What is Nonpoint Pollution?
This measurement represents exactly half of a wave's height.
What is Amplitude?
These two factors influence vertical density currents by changing how heavy the water is.
What are Temperature and Salinity?
Looking like underwater mountain ranges, these form in areas where two tectonic plates are separating and lava rises to fill the gap.
What is a Mid-Ocean Ridge?
This relatively shallow habitat sits over the continental slope and is home to corals, seaweed, dolphins, and sea turtles.
What is the Neritic habitat?
Artificial lighting on beaches can deter female nesting turtles and cause hatchlings to accidentally head towards streets—a form of this kind of pollution.
What is Light Pollution?
This represents the distance from one wave crest to the next wave crest.
What is Wavelength?
This effect, caused by the rotation of the Earth, influences the direction that surface currents turn in the northern and southern hemispheres.
What is the Coriolis Effect?
This scientist discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge and mapped the entire ocean floor by analyzing sound profiles.
Who is Marie Tharp?
Meaning "no light," very few plants live in this deep portion of the ocean because they cannot perform photosynthesis.
What is the Aphotic zone?
To find undersea oil and gas, offshore drilling operations use these tools, which produce sounds as loud as a jet engine and disrupt whales.
What are seismic air guns?
This refers to the amount of time it takes a wave to complete 1 full cycle.
What is the Period?
Driven by global wind patterns and the Earth's rotation, these large systems of circulating surface currents act like giant ocean whirlpools (and are known for trapping things like the Pacific Garbage Patch).
What are Gyres?