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Hydrothermal circulation in the oceans is the passage of the water through mid-oceanic ridge systems.. The term includes both the circulation of the well-known, high-temperature vent waters near the ridge crests, and the much-lower-temperature, diffuse flow of water through sediments and buried basalts further from the ridge crests. [3]
Aristotle correctly hypothesized that the sun played a role in the Earth's hydraulic cycle in his book Meteorology, writing "By it [the sun's] agency the finest and sweetest water is everyday carried up and is dissolved into vapor and rises to the upper regions, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth.", and believed ...
Since sunlight does not reach deep-sea hydrothermal vents, organisms in deep-sea hydrothermal vents cannot obtain energy from the sun to perform photosynthesis. Instead, the microbial life found at hydrothermal vents is chemosynthetic; they fix carbon by using energy from chemicals such as sulfide, as opposed to light energy from the sun.
The Earth's weather is a consequence of its illumination by the Sun and the laws of thermodynamics. The atmospheric circulation can be viewed as a heat engine driven by the Sun's energy and whose energy sink, ultimately, is the blackness of space. The work produced by that engine causes the motion of the masses of air, and in that process it ...
Water is the medium of the oceans, the medium which carries all the substances and elements involved in the marine biogeochemical cycles. Water as found in nature almost always includes dissolved substances, so water has been described as the "universal solvent" for its ability to dissolve so many substances.
Subsurface water may return to the surface in groundwater flow, such as from a spring, seep, or a water well, or subsurface return to streams, rivers, and oceans.Water returns to the land surface at a lower elevation than where infiltration occurred, under the force of gravity or gravity induced pressures.
A discharge is a measure of the quantity of any fluid flow over unit time. The quantity may be either volume or mass. Thus the water discharge of a tap (faucet) can be measured with a measuring jug and a stopwatch. Here the discharge might be 1 litre per 15 seconds, equivalent to 67 ml/second or 4 litres/minute. This is an average measure.
Munk & Wunsch (1998) estimated that Earth experiences 3.7 TW (0.0073 W/m 2) of tidal heating, of which 95% (3.5 TW or 0.0069 W/m 2) is associated with ocean tides and 5% (0.2 TW or 0.0004 W/m 2) is associated with Earth tides, with 3.2 TW being due to tidal interactions with the Moon and 0.5 TW being due to tidal interactions with the Sun. [3] Egbert & Ray (2001) confirmed that overall ...