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Deep ocean minerals (DOM) are mineral nutrients (chemical elements) extracted from deep ocean water (DOW) found at ocean depths between 250 and 1500 meters. DOW contains over 70 mineral nutrients and trace elements, including magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), and potassium (K) in their bio ionic form.
The Earth's crust is one "reservoir" for measurements of abundance. A reservoir is any large body to be studied as unit, like the ocean, atmosphere, mantle or crust. Different reservoirs may have different relative amounts of each element due to different chemical or mechanical processes involved in the creation of the reservoir. [1]: 18
The abundance of the chemical elements is a measure of the occurrences of the chemical elements relative to all other elements in a given environment. Abundance is measured in one of three ways: by mass fraction (in commercial contexts often called weight fraction), by mole fraction (fraction of atoms by numerical count, or sometimes fraction of molecules in gases), or by volume fraction.
Although the principal component is sodium chloride, the remaining portion can range from less than 0.2 to 22% of other salts. These are mostly calcium, potassium, and magnesium salts of chloride and sulfate with substantially lesser amounts of many trace elements found in natural seawater.
Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .
The presence of free hydrogen ions (H +) lowers the pH of the ocean. There is a natural gradient of pH in the ocean which is related to the breakdown of organic matter in deep water which slowly lowers the pH with depth: The pH value of seawater is naturally as low as 7.8 in deep ocean waters as a result of degradation of organic matter there ...
Chlorine's ability to completely dissociate in water is also why it is an essential electrolyte in many biological processes. [6] Chlorine, along with phosphorus, is the sixth most common element in organic matter. [1] Cells utilize chloride to balance pH and maintain turgor pressure at equilibrium.
Before the GOE, elements that can be in multiple oxidation states were restricted to the lowest state, and that limited the variety of minerals they could form. In older sediments, the minerals siderite (FeCO 3 ), uraninite (UO 2 ) and pyrite (FeS 2 ) are commonly found.