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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 ...
For the deep-sea ecosystem, the death of a whale is the most important event. A dead whale can bring hundreds of tons of organic matter to the bottom. Whale fall community progresses through three stages: [32] Mobile scavenger stage: Big and mobile deep-sea animals arrive at the site almost immediately after whales fall on the bottom.
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 ...
Lanternfish account for as much as 65 percent of all deep sea fish biomass and are largely responsible for the deep scattering layer of the world's oceans.. The phantom bottom is caused by the sonar misinterpreting as the ocean floor a layer of small seagoing creatures that congregate between 1,000 and 1,500 feet (300 and 460 m) below the surface.
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.
They are ubiquitous in marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments, where they often outnumber other animals in both individual and species counts. They are found in every part of the Earth's lithosphere, from the top of mountains to the bottom of oceanic trenches. [51] By count they represent 90% of all animals on the ocean floor. [52]
GEBCO is the only intergovernmental body with a mandate to map the whole ocean floor. At the beginning of the project, only 6 per cent of the world's ocean bottom had been surveyed to today's standards; as of June 2022, the project had recorded 23.4 per cent mapped. About 14,500,000 square kilometres (5,600,000 sq mi) of new bathymetric data ...
From shallow waters to the deep sea, the open ocean to rivers and lakes, numerous terrestrial and marine species depend on the surface ecosystem and the organisms found there. [28] The ocean's surface acts like a skin between the atmosphere above and the water below, and harbours an ecosystem unique to this environment.