"Cause of Barents Sea Bright Summer Waters"

16 October 2003: thanks to samples kindly collected by Petter Fossum (IMR, Norway), we now know for definite that it is indeed blooms of E. huxleyi causing the bright waters seen in SeaWifs images every summer since 1998. These SEMs are from (73 36 N, 26 48 E) at 07:20 on 16 August 2003, and from 6m depth. They were collected aboard the R/V Johan Hjort. Thanks to Jens Herrle and Richard Pearce for SEM analyses.
Everywhere we looked on the filter paper, it was covered with millions of E. huxleyi coccoliths, to the exclusion of the just about all else.














July 19th, 2003, as seen by MODIS. Image courtesy of Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.