The Surface Water &Global Temperature

Thermal Inertia: San Francisco and Norfolk, Virginia are on the same latitude meaning they are the same distance from the equator. However San Francisco is warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than Norfolk, Virginia is because of the air. The air in San Francisco has moved over the ocean, while Norfolk is over land.

Temperatures moderated on water take much longer than air to heat up and longer to cool. Therefore, on hot days, water (oceans,lakes, rivers) absorbs heat keeping the air somewhat cooler. When air gets cool, water slowly releases heat to the atmosphere raising the air temperature.

The Chemistry of Water

Water molecules are bonded because each hydrogen nucleus is bound to the central atom  by a pair of electrons that are shared between, and chemists call this a covalent chemical bond (shared electron pair)


The positive charge forms where the hydrogen ends and the negative charge forms at the oxygen end of the water molecule.

The chemistry of water that allows an insect to walk on water is called surface tension

What's unique about water is that it is able to change from a liquid to a solid, and form liquid to gas.

Sediment Cores & History

The author of this article is Alyson Santoro, and she is studying the microbes in the nitrogen cycle.

The technique that she uses is called a multicore, in which they drop a multibeam and get samples out of it.

The samples get pushed into the coldaun-measure and oxygen concentration at different depths in the core and then take samples of carbon hydrogen.

The name of the research vessel is the RSS Melville