Читать книгу Oceans For Dummies - Joseph Kraynak - Страница 75

Time to dip our toes into the ocean, literally, because if your toes ARE close to shore, you’re in the intertidal zone (also known as the littoral zone) — the area along the coastline that’s underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide. Depending on where on the coast you’re standing, the intertidal zone can look drastically different. You could be looking at a sandy beach, a mudflat, a rocky shoreline, a marsh, or a mangrove forest, for example.

The intertidal zone can be further divided into low, middle, and high regions, based on how far up from the ocean it is, which generally determines how wet it gets and therefore the nature of the marine life you’re likely to bump into. Some rocky intertidal zones contain rock pools, which are important sources of water when the tide recedes.

So who, or what, lives in the intertidal zone? Well that really depends on the region and variations in topography (for example, sand, rock, grass, mangroves, ice). We get into that more in Chapter 5. For now, let’s look at the three regions of the intertidal zone.