Oceandwelling organisms are just as sensitive to climatic changes―in this case temperature and salinity―as land animals. Reef corals can survive only in clear warm seawater. Certain foraminifers are so sensitive to changes in their environment that their presence can be taken as an index of sea...
Although modern groundwater represents a small percentage of the total groundwater on Earth, the volume of modern groundwater is equivalent to a body of water with a depth of about 3 m spread over the continents. This water resource dwarfs all other components of the active hydrologic cycle...
Also known as: salt water, saltwater Written by Alyn C. Duxbury Research Associate Professor Emeritus of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle. Author ofThe Earth and Its Oceans;coauthor ofAn Introduction to the World's Oceans.
Ocean current, stream made up of horizontal and vertical components of the circulation system of ocean waters that is produced by gravity, wind friction, and water density variation in different parts of the ocean. They are similar to winds in that they
And if you go far east into the huge block of the Eurasian land mass, you can get so far away from the effects of the ocean that the coldest temperature, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, was recorded right about here. It was, I think, -127 Fahrenheit. ...
Few subglacial lakes have been identified beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) despite extensive documentation in Antarctica, where periodic release of water can impact ice flow. Here we present an ice-sheet-wide survey of Greenland subglacial lakes, i
This latter process has a major effect on the development of oil, gas, water reservoirs, and is at the origin of the consideration of these clay-rich media as a natural barrier for CO2 capture and nuclear waste storage5,6,7. The omnipresence of clay minerals in soil environments is also ...
Moisture Active Passive mission to show that surface soil moisture—a storage believed to make up less than 0.001% of the global freshwater budget by volume, and equivalent to an, on average, 8-mm thin layer of water covering all land surfaces—plays a significant role in the water cycle. ...
River - Waterfalls, Distribution, World: The distribution of waterfalls is not uniform, and large parts of the world are free of any notable occurrence. This is not surprising in view of the relatively large proportion of the Earth’s land area that cons
s mostperniciousweeds. Weedy grasses invade and colonize disturbed habitats. While this is not a concern on roadsides, abandoned farmlands, vacant lots, and other low-value land, weedy grasses do seriously devaluecultivatedareas such as lawns, pastures, and croplands.Phragmites australis, for ...