{"id":223858,"date":"2025-10-24T01:57:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T06:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/new-study-uncovers-surprising-physics-of-marine-snow"},"modified":"2025-10-24T01:57:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T06:57:38","slug":"new-study-uncovers-surprising-physics-of-marine-snow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/new-study-uncovers-surprising-physics-of-marine-snow","title":{"rendered":"New study uncovers surprising physics of \u2018marine snow\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-study-uncovers-surprising-physics-of-marine-snow.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The deep ocean can often look like a real-life snow globe. As organic particles from plant and animal matter on the surface sink downward, they combine with dust and other material to create \u201cmarine snow,\u201d a beautiful display of ocean weather that plays a crucial role in cycling carbon and other nutrients through the world\u2019s oceans.<\/p>\n<p>Now, researchers from Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found surprising new insights into how particles sink in stratified fluids like oceans, where the density of the fluid changes with depth. In a study published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2505085122\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i><\/a>, they show that the speed at which particles sink is determined not only by resistive drag forces from the fluid, but by the rate at which they can absorb salt relative to their volume.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt basically means that <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/smaller+particles\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">smaller particles<\/a> can sink faster than bigger ones,\u201d said Robert Hunt, a postdoctoral researcher in Brown\u2019s School of Engineering who led the work. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly the opposite of what you\u2019d expect in a fluid that has uniform density.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The deep ocean can often look like a real-life snow globe. As organic particles from plant and animal matter on the surface sink downward, they combine with dust and other material to create \u201cmarine snow,\u201d a beautiful display of ocean weather that plays a crucial role in cycling carbon and other nutrients through the world\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}