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85 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
The Solar System was created about how many years ago?
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4.56 billion years
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What is known as the greenhouse gas?
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Carbon dioxide
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Why is Venus hotter than earth?
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The atmosphere is thicker
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Why has Earth maintained a habitable climate?
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The Carbon Cycle
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What was it called when Earth froze completely over?
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Snowball Earth
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Why did oxygen level increase on Earth?
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Photosynthesis
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Cyanobacteria
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First organisms to produce oxygen by photosynthesis
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heretotroph
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Organisms the CANNOT make their own food
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What were the first life on earth?
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bacteria and archaea
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Eukaryotes
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Organisms with complex cells
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what triggered the Cambrian Cycle?
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A rise in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen
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What is Dynamic Balance?
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A Leaky bucket under a faucet. (equal balance in entering and leaving heat in atmosphere)
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What part of the atmosphere does weather occur?
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Troposphere
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albedo
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only 30%of incoming solar radiation from the sun to the earth is reflected back to space.
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relative humidity
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comparison to the amount of water vapor in the air to the maximum amount of water vapor the air can hold
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Coriolis Effect
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why winds over long distances appear to curve.
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Geostrophic flow
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where pressure gradient force and and the Coriolis force exactly balance
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Climate
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Long term weather year to year
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What are the atmospheric levels of CO2 controlled by?
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A dynamic balance among biological and inorganic processes that make the carbon cycle
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What pandemic has dramatically reduced life expectancy across Africa?
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HIV/AIDS
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For generations people have tried to estimate Earth's ________, or the maximum population that it can support on a continuing basis.
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Carrying Capacity
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Fertility is a function of a woman's _________ (her physiological ability to conceive and bear children).
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fecundity
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What area within a city is defined as a contiguous settlement where the inhabitants are characterized as having inadequate housing and basic services such as drinking water and sanitation?
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Slum
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Mega-cities have a population of more than 10 million people and _________ have a population of more than 20 million people
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Meta-cities
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Fertility levels are lower in developing countries or developed countries?
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Developing Countries
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The industrial era changed many factors that affected birth and death rates, and in doing so, it triggered what?
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a dramatic decrease of the world's population
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Many chronic diseases develop ---------, and many are linked to personal choices such as diet and smoking
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Slowly
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According to current scientific estimates, modern human beings (Homo sapiens) evolved roughly
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130,000 to 160,000 years ago
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What happened In the year 2007?
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the worldwide human population living in cities exceeded that of rural areas for the first time in human history
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Healthy Public Health Initiative (HPHI)
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Helped children with asthma in Boston
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risk assessment
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An analytical study of the probabilities and magnitude of harm to human health or the environment associated with a physical or chemical agent, activity, or occurrence.
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risk management
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The human activity that integrates recognition of risk, risk assessment, development of strategies to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources.
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4 steps of environmental risk assessments
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-Hazard Identification
-Dose-response assessment -Exposure assessment -Risk characterization |
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Healthy Public Health Initiative (HPHI)
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Helped children with asthma in Boston
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potential dose
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The amount of contaminant that is inhaled or ingested into an exposed person's body or applied to skin
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potential dose
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The amount of contaminant that is inhaled or ingested into an exposed person's body or applied to skin
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Physiological ecology
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Study of the relationship between organisms and their physical environment
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Population ecology
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Study of the the relationship between organisms of the same species
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Community ecology
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Study of the relationship between organisms of different species.
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ecosystem ecology
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Study of the relationship between organisms and the fluxes of matter and energy through are biological systems.
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Ecology
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The study between the relationships in the natural world
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Rain forests cover only______ of the planet but are home to over half of the Earth's plant and animal species.
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6 percent
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Applied ecology
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Uses information found in relationships to address issues
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Important factors of ecology
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-temperature ranges
-moisture availability -light -nutrient availability |
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biomes
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Broad regional areas characterized by a distinctive climate, soil type, and biological community.
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Tropics
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warm, wet regions
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Subtropical High pressure
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Dry regions
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species richness
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A type of approach to assessing biodiversity that examines the distribution of all resident terrestrial vertebrates: amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
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latitudinal biodiversity gradient
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The increase in species richness or biodiversity that occurs from the poles to the tropics, often referred to as the latitudinal gradient in species diversity.
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trophic level
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A feeding level within a food web.
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primary producers
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Organisms that produce organic compounds from atmospheric or aquatic carbon dioxide, principally through the process of photosynthesis. Primary production is distinguished as either net or gross. All life on earth is directly or indirectly reliant on primary production.
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who are at the first tropic level?
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Primary producers; Algae, plants, etc
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gross primary productivity (GPP)
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The rate at which an ecosystem accumulates biomass, including the energy it uses for the process of respiration.
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net primary productivity (NPP)
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The rate at which new biomass accrues in an ecosystem.
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bioaccumulation
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The increase in concentration of a chemical in organisms that reside in environments contaminated with low concentrations of various organic compounds.
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The most important biochemical cycles affecting ecosystem health are...
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-water
-carbon -nitrogen -phosphorus cycles |
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The average resident time that a molecule of carbon spends in a terrestrial ecosystem is...
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17.5 years
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nitrogen fixing
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The conversion of nitrogen in the atmosphere (N2) to a reduced form (e.g., amino groups of amino acids) that can be used as a nitrogen source by organisms.
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denitrification
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Process of reducing nitrate and nitrite, highly oxidised forms of nitrogen available for consumption by many groups of organisms, into gaseous nitrogen, which is far less accessible to life forms but makes up the bulk of our atmosphere.
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life history strategy
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An organism's allocation of energy throughout its lifetime among three competing goals: growing, surviving, and reproducing.
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Every organism in an ecosystem divides its energy among three competing goals
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-growing
-surviving -reproducing |
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what happened as a result of wolves returning to Yellowstone park?
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the elk population has drastically decreased from 20,000 in the 1990s to less than 10,000 today.
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trophic cascades
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Occur when predators in a food chain suppress the abundance of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate trophic level is an herbivore). Trophic cascades may also be important for understanding the effects of removing top predators from food webs, as humans have done in many places through hunting and fishing activities.
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keystone species
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A single kind of organism or a small collection of different kinds of organisms that occupy a vital ecological niche in a given location.
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Each species in a ecosystem occupies a _____,which comprises the sum total of its relationships with the biotic and abiotic elements of it's environment; what it needs to survive
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Niche
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succession
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A fundamental concept in ecology that refers to the more or less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community.
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Autogenic succession
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change driven by inhabitants of an ecosystem; forest re-growing on abandoned agricultural fields
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Allogenic succession
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change driven by new external geophysical conditions such as a rising average temperature resulting from global climate change.
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Atmospheric pressure at sea level is _____ per square inch, and pressure increasing by an additional "one atmosphere" by every _____.
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14.7 pounds; 10 meters
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Oceans zones (Top to bottom)
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-Epipelagic
-Mesopelagic (twilight zone) -Bathypelagic -The abyss -The trenches |
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Deepest trench known to date
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Marianna's Trench
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What creates currents and exchanges between cold, deep waters and warmer surface waters?
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Mixing
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gyre
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A circular or spiral motion, especially a circular ocean current.
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Gyres rotate _____ in the northern Hemisphere
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Clockwise
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the ______ is a fast moving western boundary current that flows north through the Atlantic ocean and makes Europe much warmer than Canada provinces lying on the same latitudes.
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The Gulf Stream
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Ocean waters are warmest at the tropics and coldest at the poles because...
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The sun heats the equator more strongly than higher latitudes
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what is responsible for large temperature variations across the tropical Pacific, even though both ends of the ocean receive about the same amount of energy from sunlight.
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Wind
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___________ is often referred as the global conveyor belt because it moves large volumes of water along a course through the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
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Thermohaline Circulation
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The thermohaline circulation is driven by _______ differences that arise from temperature differences and Salinity differences
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Buoyancy
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El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
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The best known multi-annual climate cycle that which is caused every three to seven years by changes in atmospheric and ocean conditions over the pacific ocean
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Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)
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A pattern of Pacific climate variability that shifts phases on at least inter-decadal time scale, usually about 20 to 30 years.
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phytoplankton
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microorganisms that typically measure 1/20 of a milliliter across at the largest and live for 1 to 5 days
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blooms
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A relatively rapid increase in the population of (usually) phytoplankton algae in an aquatic system. Algal blooms may occur in freshwater or marine environments.
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marine snow
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The tiny leftovers of animals, plants, and non-living matter in the ocean's sun-suffused upper zones
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biological pump
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The sum of a suite of biologically-mediated processes that transport carbon from the surface euphotic zone (the depth of the water that is exposed to sufficient sunlight for photosynthesis to occur) to the ocean's interior.
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