The august Baltic blooms of August, as seen from space

The straight lines are the wakes of crossing boats — streaking like meteors through Picasso’s swirling sky. Like the whorls of fingerprints, no two phytoplankton blooms are exactly alike. Click on image for more detail.

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 here in 2005. Nodularia 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.

These are NASA Earth Observatory images from the Landsat 8 satellite.

And from a Radiolab short podcast: “Every day, every moment, an epic battle is raging across the globe. It’s happening in the ocean. I share the tale of an arms race involving trillions of sea creatures — and why their struggle is vital to our survival.”

P.S. the phage-battles are the most epic carnage on Earth — killing 40% of all ocean bacteria, every day… and these blue-green phytoplankton are responsible for half of the oxygen we breathe!