A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
marine snow
Marine snow is the continuous fall of organic material from the sunlit surface of the ocean into the dark below: dead plankton, fecal pellets, mucus, shells, dust, and everything that sticks to them, drifting down as pale flakes. It falls at a few hundred feet a day and takes weeks to reach the deep floor. It is the only food supply for most of the deep sea, which has no light and grows nothing of its own.
Etymology
The name was given by William Beebe, who descended in a steel bathysphere off Bermuda in the 1930s and described the constant downward drift past his window in exactly those terms.
Notes
Larger aggregates are called marine snow proper and the biggest are sometimes called marine blizzards. Some animals build mucus nets many feet across to strain it, and when the net clogs they abandon it and it becomes marine snow itself. A whale carcass reaching the floor supports a succession of specialized communities for decades and is called a whale fall, which is the same process at the other extreme of scale.