Much of the open ocean is actually a desert because it lacks these nutrients and cannot support life forms. In places where cold water is upwelling from the ocean depths, some of these nutrients are carried up from the ocean bottom, and provide food for life forms at the surface. Animals need both fuel and vitamins. Without them, they do not thrive. Life processes are chemical processes.
Life processes operate most efficiently within a narrow temperature range.
Both plants and animals have ways of protecting themselves from intermittent extremes of temperature, but need to stay within certain temperature ranges in their environments in order to survive. Life forms are adapted to the atmospheric or aquatic pressures at which they live. People die at high altitudes because they cannot extract enough oxygen from the air. Life forms brought up from the deep ocean will explode as the gasses dissolved in their tissues expand. On our climate charts, a desert is a region that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year.