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The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as 'seabeds'. The structure of the seabed of the global ocean is governed by plate tectonics. Most of the ocean is very deep, where the seabed is known as the abyssal plain. Seafloor spreading creates ...
Marine botany is the study of flowering vascular plant species and marine algae that live in shallow seawater of the open ocean and the littoral zone, along shorelines of the intertidal zone, coastal wetlands, and low-salinity brackish water of estuaries.
They are the only flowering plants that live in the ocean. Seagrasses are flowering plants (angiosperms) which grow in marine environments. They evolved from terrestrial plants which migrated back into the ocean about 75 to 100 million years ago. [1] [2] In the present day they occupy the sea bottom in shallow and sheltered coastal waters ...
The ocean floor is not all flat but has submarine ridges and deep ocean trenches known as the hadal zone. [6] For comparison, the pelagic zone is the descriptive term for the ecological region above the benthos, including the water column up to the surface. At the other end of the spectrum, benthos of the deep ocean includes the bottom levels ...
The sea surface microlayer (SML) at the air-sea interface is a distinct, under-studied habitat compared to the subsurface and copepods, important components of ocean food webs, have developed key adaptations to exploit this niche. [40] The ocean-spanning SML forms the boundary between the atmosphere and the hydrosphere.
"Seaweed" lacks a formal definition, but seaweed generally lives in the ocean and is visible to the naked eye. The term refers to both flowering plants submerged in the ocean, like eelgrass, as well as larger marine algae. Generally, it is one of several groups of multicellular algae; red, green and brown. [7]
Bottom trawling, microplastic pollution, and industrial metals have slowly changed and altered the composition of the sea floor. Bottom trawling refers to a commercial deep sea fishing technique in which the equipment drags across the sea floor. [77] This has had an adverse effect on the seafloor as it changes the surface structure and composition.
The kelp then sinks to the ocean floor and store the carbon where is it unlikely to be disturbed by human activity. [71] Researchers from the University of Western Australia estimated kelp forest around Australia sequestered 1.3-2.8 teragrams of carbon per year which is 27–34% of the total annual blue carbon sequestered in the Australian ...