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Winds drive ocean currents in the upper 100 meters of the ocean's surface. However, ocean currents also flow thousands of meters below the surface. These deep-ocean currents are driven by differences in the water's density, which is controlled by temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline). This process is known as thermohaline circulation.
Energy flow is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. [1] All living organisms can be organized into producers and consumers, and those producers and consumers can further be organized into a food chain. [2] [3] Each of the levels within the food chain is a trophic level. [1]
Food webs are built from food chains.All forms of life in the sea have the potential to become food for another life form. In the ocean, a food chain typically starts with energy from the sun powering phytoplankton, and follows a course such as:
The pelagic food web, showing the central involvement of marine microorganisms in how the ocean imports carbon and then exports it back to the atmosphere and ocean floor The biological pump (or ocean carbon biological pump or marine biological carbon pump ) is the ocean's biologically driven sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere and land ...
The ATP generated in this process is made by substrate-level phosphorylation, which does not require oxygen. Fermentation is less efficient at using the energy from glucose: only 2 ATP are produced per glucose, compared to the 38 ATP per glucose nominally produced by aerobic respiration. Glycolytic ATP, however, is produced more quickly.
The tiny marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, discovered in 1986, forms today part of the base of the ocean food chain and accounts for more than half the photosynthesis of the open ocean [23] and an estimated 20% of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. [24]
Electron transport chains often produce energy in the form of a transmembrane electrochemical potential gradient. The gradient can be used to transport molecules across membranes. Its energy can be used to produce ATP or to do useful work, for instance mechanical work of a rotating bacterial flagella .
The aquatic microbial loop is a marine trophic pathway which incorporates dissolved organic carbon into the food chain.. The microbial loop describes a trophic pathway where, in aquatic systems, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is returned to higher trophic levels via its incorporation into bacterial biomass, and then coupled with the classic food chain formed by phytoplankton-zooplankton-nekton.