The waters off of Australia hosted an apparent bloom of Trichodesmium, an ancient, important, and ubiquitous type of microscopic sea life.
Published Oct 7, 2017
Some of the smallest organisms on our planet can be viewed from space: MODIS on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of a plankton or bacterial bloom south of Fiji on October 18, 2010.
Published Nov 13, 2010
An important player in the nitrogen cycle, Trichodesmium makes a seasonal appearance off the northeast coast of Australia.
Published Sep 16, 2019
An unusually cloud-free day provided this spectacular view of Cakaulevu Reef, Fiji, the world’s third largest reef system.
Published Aug 13, 2011
The northern and western highlands of Scotland were still winter-brown and even dusted with snow in places, but the waters of the North Sea were blooming with phytoplankton on May 8, 2008, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the region and captured this image. The tiny, plant-like organisms swirled in the waters off the country’s east coast, coloring the shallow coastal waters shades of bright blue and green.
Published May 13, 2008
Acquired January 4, 2011, this natural-color image shows heavy sediment runoff around Cape Bowling Green, Queensland.
Published Jan 5, 2011
Rowley Shoals, a series of atolls off northwestern Australia, are popular with divers and fisherman interested in the hundreds of marine species.
Published Nov 7, 2011
The Sudanese coast of the Red Sea is a well-known destination for diving due to clear water and abundance of coral reefs (or shia’ab in Arabic). Reefs are formed primarily from precipitation of calcium carbonate by corals. (In addition to its commonly used meaning, precipitation can also describe how something dissolved in a solution becomes “undissolved” through chemical or biological processes.) Massive reef structures are built over thousands of years of succeeding generations of coral. In the Red Sea, fringing reefs form on shallow shelves of less than 50 meters depth along the coastline. This astronaut photograph illustrates the intricate morphology of the reef system located along the coast between Port Sudan to the northwest and the Tokar River delta to the southeast.
Published Mar 14, 2005
November through March is the right time of year to spot a bloom of Trichodesmium, a colorful marine bacterium that plays a key role in the nitrogen cycle.
Published Jan 16, 2015
This image of the summer phytoplankton bloom in the Barents Sea off the northwesternmost corner of Russia was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 19, 2009. The milky-blue color that dominates the bloom suggests that it contains large numbers of phytoplankton called coccolithophores.
Published Aug 22, 2009
