
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
(special bonus for explaining why it looks this way)

Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
(special bonus for explaining why it looks this way)
At first I thought it was oceanic waves (from the thumbnail), but upon closer examination, it looks more like ice crystals formed by wind on a window pane. Perhaps taken on a plane trip?
Ahhh….. warmer… that must mean that we’re looking an water sheeting on an aircraft window, not ice.
A macro of a watercolor painting, created with water and pigment (small particles) on a "big picture"…?
I’m thinking fiberglass. That or another LCD anomaly. It looks like you took the shot in long exposure sweeping from side to side.
Rocketeer, your proposition should be a winner! You made me think about the paintings of a friend of mine, Claire Merel

Bingo Benjiman, a new winner. It is a photo, through an airplane window, of the Baltic Sea along the coast of Sweden, blooming with an outbreak of cyanobacteria / blue-green algae.
Woccam got the sea, Ol’Cola nailed the abstract “particles in water”, Rocketeer had the right first instinct of an ocean through an airline window pane… And he gets special credit, by popular appeal, for finding the artistic interpretation… =)
Credited in some reports to fertilizer runoff and warmer weather, the algae blooms are quite dramatic this year. They turn the water a neon blue-green with yellow-white filaments. (Bloomberg News).
Here is a Terra MODIS satellite surface algae map for the day I was flying up from Frankfurt to Tallinn.
As I saw this colorful spectacle in the open seas, I was reminded of Craig Venter’s discovery while shotgun sequencing the microbial populations of the sea: every 250 miles, the microbial genes are 85% different. The oceans are not homogenous masses. They consist of myriad uncharted regions of ecological diversity.
Way to go benjiman!
It was nice to see such a challenging puzzle, Steve. Don’t wait so long before posting another one!
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