Massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island.


Sand dunes extending from Algeria into Mauritania in northwestern Africa

These are my favorites of a group of Landsat satellite images at Wired.

I saw those same images, Michael, and had to download the phytoplankton one. It's definitely going in all my courses from now on. Don't you love the eddies around the island? Amazing. This is exactly the sort of stuff I study.

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I don't have as many Festools as Fred. Or Marcou's, or Brese's, or Lie-Nielsen's, or Lee Valley's, or Blue Spruce's, or Harold and Saxon's, or...

What does one make of the lineations running NNE-SSW along the east coast of the island? Could they be wakes of vessels, disturbing the phytoplankotn?

Exactly - those are boat wakes. We see them all the time in satellite imagery. You can often see how they get distorted by the eddies - they spiral around themselves. These ones must have been made just before the photo, as they're still pretty straight.

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I don't have as many Festools as Fred. Or Marcou's, or Brese's, or Lie-Nielsen's, or Lee Valley's, or Blue Spruce's, or Harold and Saxon's, or...