Climate
The pattern of atmospheric conditions in an area over periods ranging from at least three decades to thousands of years.
What is climate?
This zone is the brightly lit upper zone that contains drifting phytoplankton.
What is the euphotic zone?
This is a region's distance from the Equator.
What is latitude?
The warm, nutrient-rich, shallow water extending from the high-tide mark on land to the gently sloping, shallow edge of the continental shelf.
What is the coastal zone?
What is surface water?
Mass movements of surface water driven by winds and shaped by landforms.
What are ocean currents?
This is the cold, dark region near the ocean floor.
What is the abyssal zone?
The tendency for a transition zone to have greater species diversity and a higher density of organisms than found in either of the individual ecosystems.
What is the edge effect?
Where a river meets the sea.
Surface water that flows into freshwater life zones such as lakes, ponds, inland wetlands, rivers, and streams.
What is runoff?
The deflection of a mass as it moves over a spinning surface.
What is the Coriolis effect?
This is the zone that receives little sunlight and contains fish that migrate to feed on the surface at night.
What is the bathyal zone?
This terrestrial ecosystem is identified by a combination of low rainfall and varying average temperatures.
What is a desert?
Water that has a salinity between that of salt water and fresh water.
What is brackish water?
The land area that delivers runoff, sediment, and dissolved substances to streams, lakes, or wetlands.
What is a watershed?
This refers to drier conditions on the leeward side of mountain ranges.
What is the rain shadow effect?
The three vertical zones of the open sea are based on temperatures and this.
What is the degree of penetration of sunlight?
This is underground soil where captured water can stay frozen for more than two consecutive years.
What is permafrost?
Coastal land areas covered with water all or part of the year.
What are coastal wetlands?
The process by which lakes gain nutrients.
What is eutrophication?
These are the aquatic equivalents of terrestrial biomes.
What are aquatic life zones?
The showers of dead and decaying organisms that feed most organisms in the abyssal zone.
What is marine snow?
Name the four vertical layers of a rain forest.
What are the floor, understory, canopy, and emergent layer?
The rising levels of acidity in ocean waters.
What is ocean acidification?
A lake that has a small supply of plant nutrients.
What is an oligotrophic lake?