Define
Water that flows over the Earth's surface due to precipitation or snow melting; leaching out nutrients from the land.
What is Runoff?
Needed to make bones, coral skeletons, and shells
What is calcium?
One way is by atmospheric dissolution (increased by wave turbulence) CO2 dissolves at the surface from the air allows for photosynthesis.
Alternative answers:
Upwelling
Decomposition
How is carbon replenished?
Atmosphere dissolution
Uptake
Intake
Sinking Detritus/ Dead organisms
Decomposition
Upwelling
What are common process that occur in both the Nitrogen and Carbon cycle?
1. Absorption of nutrients by primary producers.
vs
2.When animals eat other organisms in order to get the nutrients
What is the difference between Uptake and Intake?
The process of dissolving gases in seawater from the atmosphere (O2, N2,CO2) due to wave turbulence.
What is Atmospheric Dissolution?
Making of organic compounds (glucose, carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids)
What is carbon?
Nutrients like ammonia, nitrates, and phosphates are released back into the surface layer from this.
What nutrients are replenished as a result of excretion from zooplankton?
Not in a usable form. Needs to be fixed by cyanobacteria to be converted into ammonium and then ammonia which needs to be converted further into nitrates.
Is nitrogen from the atmosphere in a usable form?
When there is more nutrients, there's more productivity and vice versa.
More nutrients, more photosynthesis, increasing productivity and promoted growth in food chain since more is being passed on.
Are nutrients the limiting factors in terms of primary production?
Upwelling the movement of cold, nutrient-rich water from deep in the ocean to the surface which replaces the warmer, usually nutrient poor surface water.
What is upwelling?
Making of amino acids, proteins, and DNA.
What is nitrogen?
When calcium is being incorporated into the reefs. Corals or other shell building marine life need calcium in order to produce their skeletal structures that are the basis for reef formation. Growth of coral requires deposition of calcium carbonate.
How is calcium depleted?
Overtime, a form of calcium turns into sediment on the seafloor forming limestone, becoming new rock.
What happens when calcium carbonate is compressed?
Fertilizer adds nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates into the water by runoff. Promotes plant growth; increases productivity. Too much fertilizer, could lead to eutrophication.
Burning Fossil fuels adds more CO2 into the atmosphere (atmospheric dissolution). Reacts with seawater forming carbonic acid; causes the acidity of seawater to increase (ocean acidification)
Harvesting; all the nutrients present in the organism in the ocean are removed affecting the rest of the food chain.
How do humans affect the processes involved in the nutrient cycles?
The movement and exchange of elements that are essential to life, from inorganic molecules, through fixation and then into living organisms, before bing decomposed back into inorganic molecules.
What are nutrient cycles?
Plants need it to make chlorophyll.
What is magnesium?
Depletes nutrients from the upper layers of the ocean. Decay/decomposition of organisms remains are brought to the bottom of the sea, forming sediments.
Also sinking detritus depletes nutrients from the top. Nutrients such as carbon can be lost.
What is the role of sinking at the surface?
1. Weathering and erosion of rocks on land; rainwater runoff into sea.
2. Uptake of the nutrient by marine organisms to make bones, shells, and coral skeleton. (Incorporation into reefs)
3. Death and sinking of Detritus to the seafloor.
What are the first three processes in the Calcium Cycle?
When there is an excess amount of nutrients, it causes an increased in primary productivity; increasing photosynthesis. Algal bloom is created which is harmful since the growth of phytoplankton is uncontrolled/explodes and covers the surface of the water. Resulting in the light not being able to penetrate through to the producers below the top surface. Those producers die and decompose. Bacteria takes in O2, during decomposition, and deprives rest of organisms from O2, eventually killing them (dead zones). Establishing Hypoxic and/or anoxic areas.
What is eutrophication?
Part of the abiotic phase of the nutrient cycle where nutrients can remain for long period of time.
What is a reservoir?
Needed to make bones and DNA.
What is phosphorus?
Depletes; removal of all the nutrients present in any marine species when harvested by humans.
Can be replenished when fish is eaten and digested by humans and some of the nitrogen containing compounds are then lost in urine, which ends up in sewage, then it can be released into rivers and oceans after treatment. In this way, nitrogen containing compounds present in the original fish return to the ocean.
How can harvesting replenish and deplete nutrients?
1. This nutrient enters through atmosphere dissolution due to wave turbulence.
2. Phytoplankton then uptakes it for photosynthesis.
3. Is then passed along the food chain (Intake).
4. Zooplankton and other organisms release it back into sea through cellular respiration and some gets released back into the atmosphere.
5. Is lost from surface by death and sinking detritus.
6. Can then be released back into deep sea through decomposition by the bacteria.
7. Can then be replenished back to the surface (upwelling).
What are the seven processes in the carbon cycle?
Due to the influx of nutrients that goes out by processes, such as harvesting & sinking, and goes in the ocean by process, such as runoff and atmospheric dissolution. Which by nature, the balance/equilibrium is kept constant, since what is bing taking out is replenished by nutrients coming in. But balance can be affected by human impact. (e.g. burning of fossil fuels leading to ocean acidification)
Why does the mean concentration of nutrients remain constant?