Mystery Of Why Parts Of The Southern Ocean Light Up Strangely In Satellites Has Been Solved

For several decades, scientists have been seeing weirdly bright areas of the Antarctic oceans on satellite images. The mystery has been extremely difficult to investigate due to the harsh conditions in these seas, but now we know what’s going on. The water appears to be filled with silica-rich diatoms, a unicellular organism, and coccolithophores, a type of marine microalgae with elaborate shells that reflect light – enough to be picked up as a glowing region by satellites.

Back in the early 2000s, Barney Balch, a senior research scientist emeritus at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, and colleagues identified something strange on satellite images. It appeared that large amounts of seawater encircling Antarctica were appearing much brighter than other areas. It turns out that this ar