water column

noun

plural water columns

: a vertical expanse of water stretching between the surface and the floor of a body of water

Shallow feeders, sea lions work the top 600 feet of the water column for hake, rock-fish, herring, sardines … and squid, but opportunistically capturing anything that happens by.—

Downs Matthews

Only a few animals of the water column above would have died and settled into the sediments below during the short time when the mudslide was coalescing into a layer of sediment in the stagnant basin.—

Stephen Jay Gould

: a vertical pipe with valves and spout for delivering water to a locomotive tender

Examples of water column in a Sentence

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Their early developmental stages happen internally, resulting in fully-fledged larvae that reach the water column. —

IEEE Spectrum, 20 Nov. 2024 And that’s just one way microplastics can move up and down the water column and settle in the mud. —

Matt Simon, WIRED, 4 Sep. 2019 On bright sunny days, schools of baitfish will move to the top of the water column to feed on phytoplankton. —

Kubie Brown, Outdoor Life, 3 Oct. 2024 Really giving it a ton of action and letting those tentacles do the work up in the water column seems to generate a lot more bites. —

Shaye Baker, Outdoor Life, 8 Aug. 2024 See all Example Sentences for water column