Shores and Shallow Seas
Seas, oceans and lakes accumulate sediment over time. The sediment could consist of terrigenous material, which originates on land, but may be deposited in either terrestrial, marine, or lacustrine (lake) environments; or of sediments (often biological) originating in the body of water. Terrigenous material is often supplied by nearby rivers and streams or reworked marine sediment (e.g. sand). In the mid-ocean, living organisms are primarily responsible for the sediment accumulation, their shells sinking to the ocean floor upon death.
Deposited sediments are the source of sedimentary rocks, which can contain fossils of the inhabitants of the body of water that were, upon death, covered by accumulating sediment. Lake bed sediments that have not solidified into rock can be used to determine past climatic conditions.
Read more about this topic: Sediment
Famous quotes containing the words shores, shallow and/or seas:
“Something is about to happen. Leaves are still.
Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.
Perhaps he will fall.”
—Alfred Wellington Purdy (b. 1919)
“This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The drying up a single tear has more
Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)