The high diversity of grain-size parameters of marine and oceanic sediments is determined by hydrodynamical and gravitational
processes. Grain-size spectra of the sediments in the World Ocean are represented by two main types. Filtering organisms that
passively inherit the proportions of clayey fractions in suspended matter only accelerate the deposition of fine particles,
not influencing their distribution at the bottom.
Original Russian Text © V.N. Sval’nov, T.N. Alekseeva, 2006, published in Okeanologiya, 2006, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 584–565.