A world within a world

This shot was taken by a NASA satellite.

It, along with probably thousands of fascinating images, are available at NASA's EarthObservatory site. Each shot has a great explanation of what it is you're looking at.

Personally, I love the ones like this. Swirls within the ocean visualized by phytoplankton. Undersatnding the dynamics is complicated because the lifespan of the eddies is different from the lifespan of the phytoplankton that make them dramatically visible. Nonetheless, you can see the ocean being "stirred" (I can trace lines in and around the swirls) as well as the ocean being "mixed" (where did that swirl go, anyway?) You will see the same thing if you stir your coffee and then put milk in it.

Incidently, these phytoplankton are probably a specific kind called coccolithophores and more specifically, Emeliania Huxleyi. This is what they look like under the microscope:

Now here is where things get kind of fascinating, I think. The top figure has a scale bar 10 kilometres. The bottom one has a scale of microns. There are 1 billion microns in a kilometre.
--
1 billion! To put that number in perspective, if you had 1 billion pennies, you'd need more than forty 40-foot containers to store them. So think of how many of these little guys must be in that picture.

Also, those little plates on the the coccoloilthophore are called coccoliths. They are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and, to make a long story short, it is thought that the export of the their shells into the sediments is a way to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. So if the ocean is going to be the vector by which carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere, it is possible that we'll need to count on our friends in the satellite photo to do the dirty work.