Your about says to ask you about limnology. What is it? /genq
Limnology is the study of inland waters (such as lakes, rivers, or wetlands)! It's a super diverse field, but basically as limnologists, we study inland aquatic ecosystems. That includes the physical, chemical and biological aspects that influence them, their health, their behaviour, and how humans, plants, and animals interact with them!
Since limnology is so broad, people usually focus on a specific aspect: lakes or rivers, freshwater or saline (salty... yep, the oceans aren't the only salty water body!), water chemistry, how human activity in the drainage basin changes the water body, nutrient cycling, climate change, etc... I mainly focus on lakes, since I've been fascinated by them ever since I was a little kid. We focus a lot on the oceans because they're so huge and the creatures are often more charismatic, but there's so so much to learn about inland waters too!
I keep my limnology talk on this blog tagged with #lake lundi if you want to find it! mostly i just talk into the void since it is not very popular content here haha. but bc you asked here is a bonus lake fact:
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Most lakes are holomictic, which means that there is mixing of the surface waters and deep waters at least once a year, often more. however, some lakes are meromictic, which means the different layers of water don't mix. This has major impacts on the kinds of life that you can find in the lake: the deepest waters become incredibly oxygen poor and very few organisms can survive there. This means the sediments at the bottom usually stay undisturbed, and so climate scientists can sometimes use them to figure out what the climate was like in years past by looking at each layer of sediment, just like with ice cores or tree rings!
It's often really bad if meromictic lakes do get mixed up somehow. The oxygen-poor water comes up from below and decreases the amount available at the surface, which is obviously bad for fish and other aquatic life who need oxygen to survive. Sometimes gases like CO2 or methane can slowly build up at the bottom of the lake, and then when the mixing occurs they are released all at once, which was the case at Lake Nyos in Cameroon (with deadly results, see my post about that here!).
anywayssss hope that was somewhat interesting for you ty for allowing me to infodump about limnology!!!
