HomeGlossary of Terms
Abyss: A vast, immeasurable space; a bottomless pit.
Evaporation: When the sun warms the water, some of it is changed into gas.
Estuary: The wide part of a river's lower end, where it meets the tides of the sea.
Condensation: The gas produced when evaporation takes place is called water vapor. It rises and forms clouds.
Continental Shelf: A shallow underwater plain that is the edge of a continent.
Continental Slope: The slope between the continental shelf and the floor of the deep ocean.
Coral: The hard skeleton secreted by certain marine polyps of tropical seas, deposited in masses that form reefs or atolls.
Crest: The top of a wave.
Crustacean: Any of a large group of segmented invertebrates, such as shrimp and crabs, that usually live in water and have hard shells.
Current: The movement of water through the ocean.
Hydrologic Cycle: The process in which the earth's water evaporates, falls to Earth as rain or snow, returns to the sea in rivers, and is then evaporated again.
Plankton: Free-floating, microscopic plant and animal life found in fresh or salt water.
Precipitation: When water vapor gets heavy it falls back to earth in various forms of precipitation. For example, if it is cold, it will snow; if it is warm, it will rain.
Recycled: Some precipitation is absorbed into the ground and the rest falls into streams, lakes, and oceans.
Tide: The periodic change, occurring about every twelve hours, in the height of the surface of oceans and bodies of water near or feeding into them, caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun.