Day 4 out of the picture and tomorrow concludes the last day of our first week. So what I learned today was about tides, composition of ocean water, currents, and waves.
There are two tides that occur each day high tide and low tide, each occur 2 times a day with with a total time of 12 hours and 25 minutes each day, making a whole tidal day 24 hours and 50 minutes.. Tides are vital to certain species of marine life, they help cue these species to awake from a hibernation (trigger spawning) Examples are horseshoe crabs(popular eel bait) and grunions.
Ocean water is composed of only 96.5 % water and the other 3.5% is salt. This salt provides certain nutrients to marine life.
Next I learned that certain currents can be potentially dangerous if you have no idea what to do. Especially rip currents, if you are ever caught in one of these make sure to stay calms and swim parallel to the shore. Certain currents however are helpful. Ocean currents help stabilize the temperature of waters. Warm water currents go to the cold water and cold water currents come to the warm water. This is very important for marine life as we have learned in recent articles that we read for homework. Certain species need a certain temperature and these currents help regulate the ocean temperature from extremes.
Finally, we learned about one of the oceans most famous qualitys, its waves. Waves are formed by winds. These winds come from the difference of temperature. Essentially waves are neccessary for marine life. They help circulate vital nutrients to marine life on shore and they also help disperse larvae of many animals.
