Who is Who in the Sea!

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Lakshadweep comes from Lakshadwipa, which means "one hundred thousand islands" in Sanskrit. The islands form the smallest Union Territory of India: The islands are the northernmost of the Lakshadweep-Maldives-Chagos group of islands. Socotra also spelled Soqotra is the largest island, being part of a small archipelago of four islands. Masirah is an island off the East coast of Oman. The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Oman that is completely depleted of oxygen, as a result of which it does not support marine life.

It is the world's largest-known dead zone with an area larger than that of Scotland.

BBC - Earth - Is the sea really blue?

Media related to Arabian Sea at Wikimedia Commons. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 7 February Earth 's oceans and seas. Hydrography of the Indian subcontinent.

Countries bordering the Arabian Sea. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. In other projects Wikimedia Commons.

This page was last edited on 28 November , at Lakes are temporary storage areas for water. Rivers and streams bring water to the lakes, and other rivers carry water out of lakes.

Thus, lakes are really only wide depressions in a river channel that have filled with water. Water flows in one end and out the other. All the water that flows into these lakes escapes only by evaporation. When water evaporates, the dissolved salts are left behind.

What's the difference between an ocean and a sea?

So a few lakes are salty because rivers carried salts to the lakes, the water in the lakes evaporated and the salts were left behind. After years and years of river inflow and evaporation, the salt content of the lake water built up to the present levels. The same process made the seas salty. Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean.

Seven Seas

Water evaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean. Because of the huge volume of the oceans, hundreds of millions of years of river input were required for the salt content to build to its present level. Rivers are not the only source of dissolved salts. About twenty years ago, features on the crest of oceanic ridges were discovered that modified our view on how the sea became salty. These features, known as hydrothermal vents, represent places on the ocean floor where sea water that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust, has become hotter, and has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, now flows back into the ocean.

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With the hot water comes a large complement of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the oceans could seep through the oceanic crust in about 10 million years. Thus, this process has a very important effect on salinity. The reactions between seawater and oceanic basalt, the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from the water.