A BLIZZARD is not something you’d expect to find in the deep ocean. But when sailors first travelled underwater in submarines, they thought they had been caught in a snowstorm.
Superficially, marine snow shows some surprising similarities with its atmospheric counterpart. It falls under gravity, from the ocean surface to the seafloor, and it is highly seasonal, with late spring and summer being peak times. But it is a very different substance from the stuff that falls from clouds: for one thing, it glows in the dark.
So what is it? Marine snowflakes are made up of an assortment of…
