Off the coast of Antarctica, vibrant green phytoplankton swirls amidst the sea ice.
There is plenty of plant-like life around Antarctica; you just have to know when and where to look. During the austral spring and summer, coastal waters sometimes swirl with vibrant green color—the surface expression of a huge phytoplankton bloom.
The floating, microscopic plant-like organisms were abundant in Terra Nova Bay and McMurdo Sound on January 21, 2020, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this image. Such colorful swirls in coastal waters are sometimes caused by sediments stirred up by waves and currents. But scientists say the source of the color this month has a biological origin.
“It is definitely a phytoplankton bloom,” said Kevin Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University. “They tend to form every year in Terra Nova Bay around January.” Robert Dunbar, a fellow researcher at Stanford, agrees that the color is a phytoplankton bloom. “These kinds of features are common in Antarctica’s coastal polynyas in summer and late summer.”
Continue reading at NASA Earth Observatory
Image via NASA Earth Observatory
