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Benthic boundary layer
The benthic boundary layer is the region of water directly above a lake, river, or ocean sediment, where flow and solute transport are shaped by the sediment surface.
Benthic flux
A benthic flux is the rate at which a dissolved chemical species crosses the sediment-water interface per unit area, linking sediment chemistry to the overlying water.
Benthic-pelagic coupling
Benthic-pelagic coupling is the exchange of nutrients, mass, and energy between a water body's bottom sediments and its overlying water column, first described in 1975.
Bergeron process
The Bergeron process, also called the Wegener–Bergeron–Findeisen process, is the mechanism by which ice crystals in cold clouds grow at the expense of supercooled water droplets.
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature is an independent global temperature record produced by the Berkeley Earth non-profit in California, combining land and ocean measurements from 1850 onward.
Berkeley Pit
The Berkeley Pit is a former open-pit copper mine in Butte, Montana, worked from 1955 to 1983 and since filled with acidic, metal-laden water as part of a Superfund site.
Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study
The Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) is an oceanographic program sampling the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda monthly since October 1988 to track ocean chemistry and climate change.
Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences
The Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) is an oceanographic research and education institute in Bermuda, founded in 1903 and affiliated with Arizona State University since 2021.
Beryl
Beryl is a hexagonal beryllium aluminum silicate mineral, Be3Al2Si6O18, best known as the parent of the gemstones emerald and aquamarine and as one of the two ore minerals of beryllium.
Best track
A best track is a meteorological agency's post-storm, six-hourly record of a tropical cyclone's smoothed positions and intensities, its best estimate of what the storm did.
Bet Meir or Amminadav Formation
The Bet Meir or Amminadav Formation is a disputed name for Early Cenomanian platey limestones at the 'Ein Yabrud quarries in the West Bank, Palestine.
Beta effect (oceanography)
The beta effect in oceanography is the increase of the Coriolis parameter with latitude, which drives western boundary currents such as the Gulf Stream and westward-propagating Rossby waves.
Bezymianny
Bezymianny (Безымянный), an andesitic stratovolcano (2,882 m) in Kamchatka's Klyuchevskoy group, Russia; considered extinct until its catastrophic 1956 directed-blast eruption, now continuously rebuilding its lava dome with frequent explosive eruptions.
Bingham Canyon Mine
The Bingham Canyon Mine, known locally as the Kennecott Copper Mine, is a giant open-pit copper mine near Salt Lake City, Utah, and the largest man-made excavation on earth.
Biocrust
A biocrust, short for biological soil crust, is a community of cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, and other organisms binding the top millimeters of soil, especially in drylands.
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a carbon dioxide removal technology in which biomass produces energy and the resulting CO₂ is captured and stored geologically.
Bioerosion
Bioerosion is the removal of hard substrate such as rock, limestone, and coral carbonate by the direct action of organisms, through boring, grazing, etching, and dissolution.
Biogenic silica
Biogenic silica (BSi), also called biogenic opal, is the amorphous hydrated silica that diatoms, radiolarians, sponges, and plants build into skeletons and cell walls from dissolved silicic acid.
Biogeochemical Argo
Biogeochemical Argo, or BGC-Argo, is an international program launched in 2016 that extends the Argo float array with sensors for oxygen, nitrate, pH, and chlorophyll.
Biogeochemical cycle
A biogeochemical cycle, also called a mineral cycle or cycle of matter, is the pathway by which a chemical element moves through Earth's biotic and abiotic compartments, including the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles.
Biological pump
The biological pump, also called the biological carbon pump, transfers organic carbon fixed by surface plankton into the ocean interior, keeping CO₂ out of the atmosphere for centuries.
Biostratigraphy
Biostratigraphy, also called biocorrelation, is the branch of stratigraphy that organizes rock strata by their fossil content into units called biozones, chiefly to correlate rocks of the same age.
Biotite
Biotite, also known as black mica, is the group name for dark, iron-rich mica minerals occurring widely in igneous and metamorphic rocks such as granite and gneiss.
Bioturbation
Bioturbation is the reworking of soils and sediments by living organisms through particle mixing and bioirrigation, a process Charles Darwin first quantified in his 1881 study of earthworms.
Biozone
A biozone is a body of strata defined by its fossil content, the fundamental unit of biostratigraphy, rooted in William Smith's law of faunal succession.
Birimian Greenstone Belt
The Birimian Greenstone Belt is a set of 2.2 to 2.0 billion-year-old rock belts in West Africa, named after the Birim River in Ghana and rich in gold.
Birnessite
Birnessite is a hydrous layered manganese oxide mineral, first described in 1956 from Birness, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and common in soils, desert varnish, and marine manganese nodules.
Birthstone
A birthstone is a gemstone assigned to a person's month of birth, worn as jewelry or given as a gift; the modern American list was standardized in 1912.
Bjørn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank ranking solutions by cost-benefit analysis.
Black carbon
Black carbon is light-absorbing soot from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, a major climate warming agent with an atmospheric lifetime of about one week.