At a place where seven different water masses meet, the waters are teeming with phytoplankton and fish.
Phytoplankton are sometimes called “the grass of the sea.” Like green plants on land, these floating, microscopic organisms play several key roles in making life on Earth possible. First, they are a source of food for zooplankton, shellfish, and marine creatures that eventually become food for other, larger creatures. They also produce a sizable amount of the oxygen in our oceans and atmosphere. And phytoplankton help remove carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere, consuming it during photosynthesis and sinking it to the ocean depths in decaying cells and fecal matter from marine life (a phenomenon known as marine snow).
In January 2022, the Atlantic Ocean off of South America was teeming with phytoplankton, as it does most austral summers. On January 24, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a natural-color image (above) of blooms stretching across hundreds of kilometers. The closeup below was captured the same day by the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite. MODIS sensors have been observing nearly continuous blooms in the area since the end of November.
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory
