{"title":"Small Things Considered","authors":"Brandon Kieft","doi":"10.1128/MICROBE.11.186.1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Though seawater looks uniform to our eyes, it is actually highly heterogeneous, containing vast amounts of microscopic particles, fluctuating chemical and nutri-ent gradients, and 1 billion or so diverse microbial organisms per liter. Turbu-lence, diffusion, thermal mixing, and currents add to the patchiness of ocean water, churning and stirring molecular-sized resources. Near the coastal oceans and in estuaries, especially at higher lati-tudes that have distinct seasons, varying sources of dissolved organic compounds make microgradients even more pro-nounced: during times of high river discharge, a coastal environment can become inundated with resources from washed-out terrestrial matter, often leading to phytoplankton blooms.","PeriodicalId":87479,"journal":{"name":"Microbe (Washington, D.C.)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1128/MICROBE.11.186.1","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Microbe (Washington, D.C.)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1128/MICROBE.11.186.1","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Though seawater looks uniform to our eyes, it is actually highly heterogeneous, containing vast amounts of microscopic particles, fluctuating chemical and nutri-ent gradients, and 1 billion or so diverse microbial organisms per liter. Turbu-lence, diffusion, thermal mixing, and currents add to the patchiness of ocean water, churning and stirring molecular-sized resources. Near the coastal oceans and in estuaries, especially at higher lati-tudes that have distinct seasons, varying sources of dissolved organic compounds make microgradients even more pro-nounced: during times of high river discharge, a coastal environment can become inundated with resources from washed-out terrestrial matter, often leading to phytoplankton blooms.