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Oceanography (from Ancient Greek ὠκεανός (ōkeanós) ' ocean ' and γραφή (graphḗ) ' writing '), also known as oceanology, sea science, ocean science, and marine science, is the scientific study of the ocean, including its physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. It is an Earth science, which covers a wide range of topics ...
Distinctive white lines trace the flow of surface currents around the world. An ocean current is a continuous, directed movement of seawater generated by a number of forces acting upon the water, including wind, the Coriolis effect, breaking waves, cabbeling, and temperature and salinity differences. [ 1 ]
Marine geology. Marine geology or geological oceanography is the study of the history and structure of the ocean floor. It involves geophysical, geochemical, sedimentological and paleontological investigations of the ocean floor and coastal zone. Marine geology has strong ties to geophysics and to physical oceanography.
In oceanography, a gyre (/ ˈdʒaɪər /) is any large system of circulating ocean surface currents, particularly those involved with large wind movements. Gyres are caused by the Coriolis effect; planetary vorticity, horizontal friction and vertical friction determine the circulatory patterns from the wind stress curl (torque).
The entire ocean, containing 97% of Earth's water, spans 70.8% of Earth's surface, [8] making it Earth's global ocean or world ocean. [23] [25] This makes Earth, along with its vibrant hydrosphere a "water world" [43] [44] or "ocean world", [45] [46] particularly in Earth's early history when the ocean is thought to have possibly covered Earth ...
Marine geophysics is the scientific discipline that employs methods of geophysics to study the world's ocean basins and continental margins, particularly the solid earth beneath the ocean. It shares objectives with marine geology, which uses sedimentological, paleontological, and geochemical methods. Marine geophysical data analyses led to the ...
Argo (oceanography) The distribution of active floats in the Argo array, colour coded by country that owns the float, as of February 2018. Argo is an international programme for researching the ocean. It uses profiling floats to observe temperature, salinity and currents. Recently it has observed bio-optical properties in the Earth's oceans.
Mid-ocean ridge cross-section (cut-away view) A mid-ocean ridge (MOR) is a seafloor mountain system formed by plate tectonics. It typically has a depth of about 2,600 meters (8,500 ft) and rises about 2,000 meters (6,600 ft) above the deepest portion of an ocean basin. This feature is where seafloor spreading takes place along a divergent plate ...