There are other motions in the restless sea. The water masses are constantly “turning over” in a cycle that may take hundreds of years, yet is essential to bring oxygen down to the creatures of the deeps, and nutrients (fertilizers) up from the sea floor to the surface. Here the floating phytoplankton (the plants of the sea) build through photosynthesis the organic material that will start the nutrient cycle all over again. Enormous tonnages of these tiny sea plants, rather than being rooted in the soil, are separated from solid earth by up to several vertical miles of saltwater. Sometimes, too, there is a more rapid surge of deep water to the surface, a process known as upwelling.
Internal waves, far below the surface, develop between water masses that have different densities and between which there is relative motion. These waves are much like the wind-driven waves on the surface, though much bigger: Internal waves may have heights of 300 feet or more and be 6 miles or more in length!
A dividing cell of the diatom Corethron hystrix. Diatoms, one-celled photosynthetic plants, are the primary producers of organic matter in fresh waters.
Ocean currents feed sand from nearby beaches into this “sandfall”, which is about 30 feet high, in a submarine canyon off Baja California.
Among other motions of the sea there are landslides, or turbidity currents, which are great boiling mixes of mud, rock, sand, and water rushing down submarine mountainsides at speeds of a mile a minute. They destroy everything in their paths and spread clouds of debris over the abyssal plains like a sandstorm, producing fanlike deposits radiating far out from the base of the slope. And there are tsunamis, or seismic sea waves—popularly misnamed “tidal waves”—that transmit energy from undersea earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. At sea, these waves are only a few inches high, but they may travel great distances at 500 miles an hour. As they approach the shoaling waters of a coast, they are slowed to about 30 miles an hour and build up great surface waves capable of destroying harbor and coastal installations.
A Mix of Elements
The sea is a chemistry, too. Over 60 elements have been discovered in measurable amounts in solution or in suspension in the ocean. Many of these are in the form of salts, making seawater a highly efficient electrolyte, and a most corrosive fluid. The study of corrosion and techniques for combatting it is a continuous one in which nuclear energy already has a principal role.
Because the sea is so much a chemistry, it is a potential source of minerals for the world’s growing industrial appetite. All of our magnesium and most of our bromine already are extracted directly from seawater. Oil and sulfur are mined from the sea floor or beneath it, as are coal (United Kingdom and Japan), iron ore (Japan), tin (Thailand and United Kingdom), diamonds (Southwest Africa), and gold (Alaska). In the layered sediments that cover the ocean-basin floors to depths of thousands of feet, geologists believe there also may be found some missing chapters of earth history.