Marine Snow As Food and Scientific Data Essay

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Environmentalism -- Marine Snow

"Marine snow" is material sinking from at or near the top to the bottom of a water body. It contains many forms of animate and inanimate matter and is important as food and a measure of the health of a water body. Modern scientists are particularly interested in marine snow due to the data it contributes for determining pollution and climate change.

"Marine snow" is a cascade of organic and inorganic material sinking from higher levels of water to lower levels of water in a body of water. Marine snow includes living and nonliving materials and matter, such as: algae (Grossart, Czub and Simon), nanophytoplankton, bacteria (Romero-Ibarra and Silverberg), plants, animals, feces, sand, soot and dust (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). As plants and animals on or close to the surface of a body of water die and deteriorate, they sink toward the floor of the water body (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Marine snow is called "snow" because the sinking material looks something like snowflakes falling from the sky. The flakes of marine snow are sometimes invisible to the naked eye as they start their descent but accumulate and sometimes stick to each other, creating even bigger flakes as they slowly fall to the floor of the water body.

Marine snow is important in several respects.

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First, marine snow is food, containing carbon and nitrogen, for the water body's animals and fish who live in the deeper parts of the water body. One way animals and fish consume the marine snow is by filtering it as it sinks, for example, as a baleen whale filters food from the water. Another way animals and fish consume the marine snow is by scavenging it from the water body's floor, for example, as lobsters scavenge for food on an ocean floor. Whatever marine snow is uneaten becomes part of the water body's floor, continuing to deteriorate into murky sludge that thickens at the rate of six meters per million years (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Second, marine snow is important because it helps scientists determine the carbon-based content, inorganic content, increasing/decreasing pollution, climate change (News Reporter Staff - NewsRx) and general health of bodies of water, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Romero-Ibarra and Silverberg), the oceans (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), major rivers and basically any body of water deemed important to the survival of plant,….....

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