Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The cryosphere is an umbrella term for those portions of Earth's surface where water is in solid form. This includes sea ice, ice on lakes or rivers, snow, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground (which includes permafrost). Thus, there is a overlap with the hydrosphere. The cryosphere is an integral part of the global climate system.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
Photosynthesis usually refers to oxygenic photosynthesis, a process that produces oxygen. Photosynthetic organisms store the chemical energy so produced within intracellular organic compounds (compounds containing carbon) like sugars, glycogen , cellulose and starches .
Photosynthesis by phytoplankton lowers the partial pressure of CO 2 in the upper ocean, thereby facilitating the absorption of CO 2 from the atmosphere by generating a steeper CO 2 gradient. [55] It also results in the formation of particulate organic carbon (POC) in the euphotic layer of the epipelagic zone (0–200 m depth).
Oxygenic photosynthesis can be performed by plants and cyanobacteria; cyanobacteria are believed to be the progenitors of the photosystem-containing chloroplasts of eukaryotes. Photosynthetic bacteria that cannot produce oxygen have only one photosystem, which is similar to either PSI or PSII .
Ice sheets, ice caps and glaciers, the floating sea ice of the polar regions, lake ice, snow on the ground, and permafrost, permanently frozen ground in northern latitudes, all make up the cryosphere.
Before this time, any oxygen produced by cyanobacterial photosynthesis would be readily removed by the oxidation of reducing substances on the Earth's surface, notably ferrous iron, sulfur and atmospheric methane. Free oxygen molecules did not start to accumulate in the atmosphere until the rate of production of oxygen began to exceed the ...
It also acts as an essential co-factor in enzymes involved in plant photosynthesis. [3] Troposphere ... The cryosphere is able to retain some chlorine deposited by ...