A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
seamount
A seamount is an underwater mountain rising a thousand feet or more from the seafloor and not reaching the surface. Most are extinct volcanoes. They interrupt deep currents and force water upward, which brings nutrients into the lighter zone above and concentrates life, so a seamount is an island of abundance in open ocean with corals, sponges, fish, and the predators that follow them.
Etymology
The word is a plain twentieth-century compound coined as the mapping of the seafloor got underway. A flat-topped one is a guyot, named for a person rather than a shape. Tens of thousands have been mapped and the estimated total runs into the hundreds of thousands, most of which have never been seen.
Notes
Seamounts function as stepping stones and as isolated habitats at the same time, and species found on one are sometimes found on no other. Tuna, sharks, seabirds, and whales use them as navigational and feeding waypoints on long crossings, and satellite tracking of large ocean animals shows tracks that bend to touch them one after another across thousands of miles of otherwise empty water.