The august Baltic blooms of August, as seen from space. […]

The august Baltic blooms of August, as seen from space. The straight lines are the wakes of crossing boats, bright dots streaking like meteors through Picasso’s swirling sky. Like the whorls of fingerprints, no two phytoplankton blooms are exactly alike.

Just off the coast of my Estonian homeland crossing to Sweden, the cyanobacteria are now in florid bloom. Credited in some reports to fertilizer runoff and warmer weather, these blue-green algal blooms have been growing in intensity since I first photographed them in 2005: https://flic.kr/p/3FNEy. 𝘕𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘶𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘢 turns the water a neon color of blue-green with yellow-white filaments, often toxic. They are an ancient type of marine bacteria that captures and stores solar energy through photosynthesis.