Blog 4

Post at least 1 question for each biome and try to find an answer for it.

Freshwater

I've never heard that ponds are seasonal. The ponds I've seen seem to always be there...then again, I'm not always by a pond. Why are some ponds seasonal? Does the water dry up and then come back as the rainy seasons return? That would make sense. Or maybe the salt that is settled in the dirt sucks it up after a certain period of time and weather?

Marine

If so much of our rain comes from the ocean, why aren't rain drops salty? My best guess is that this is because only the water evaporates into the air, not the tiny bits of solids that come with it. But then why is some rainwater dirty? Or have I just always thought that rain was dirty, but it turns out that rain is actually pure water? Or does the water catch the pollutants in the air as it falls?

Desert

The text says that deserts are pieces of land that get less than 50 centimeters in a year, but why is it that they only get this much in a year? Weather varies, covering different areas at different times, with no particular patterns. So why don't deserts become non-deserts at any point in the year? I guess it would make sense that many deserts are near the equator, which would probably mean that the clouds would break apart before they could rain, most of the time.

Forest

Since plants were some of the first pieces of life, does that mean some creatures were made from plants? I'm not even sure where to begin with this question.

Grassland

The text for the Savanna grasslands said that it was crucial for the rainfall to be concentrated into six to eight months. This just ties me back to my questions about deserts. Why do the clouds go from place to place to help keep certain ecosystems alive? If these grasslands are watered only by chance, why are there still so many of them? The possibilities of where the rain clouds go seem infinite.

Tundra

Since tundras use mostly dead organic materials as a nutrient pool, so we take a lot of these dead plants to use for commercial compost? Are we ruining these particular biomes somehow?