Marine snow is a shower of organic material falling from upper waters to the deep ocean. NOAA scientists and others have measured the amount of usable material in marine snow and found that there is plenty of carbon and nitrogen to feed many of the scavengers in the deep sea.
1) Quantification & time of organic rafting can be ascertained from the collected data. 2) If the source of the material, is from a very far off place, the degree of divergence of the current, if any can also be found out. 3) If the source of C & N is from plankton, it means that inspite of enough primary productivity of the waters, there are fewer consumers belonging to the 3rd trophic level. 4) If the source of C & N is not from plankton, it would mean that there is substantial predation among animals from 3rd to top trophic levels.
If point 1 is true, then it would mean there would have been flash floods from point source or the embankments & the terrain are not fully protected. If point 3 is true, then it offers good scope for aquaculture in the area. If point 4 is true, then there is scope for capture fisheries.
Small contribution: Organic export fluxes have been directly related to the planktonic foodweb efficiency.
Article Connecting export fluxes to plankton food-web efficiency in ...
Dear Shankhadeep Chakraborty ,
I found this link that may be interesting for you.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00355486#page-1
http://noc.ac.uk/gsnocs/project/computer-vision-machine-learning-oceanographic-research
Regards, Shafagat
The Economist April 15 2017 in an article titled "Mapping the mesopelagic" describes a program to study the oceanic snow. Perhaps your post of April 19,2016 inspired their interest. The institutions involved are Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, NASA, and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. Let us hope the Economist's warning to avoid another instance of the "Tragedy of the Common" will be heeded.
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