That is all... (image taken by Nasa's GOES-13 satellite on November 24, 2010) – shame it's showing the wrong side... I spent hours mooning the sky yesterday.
In the style of Van Gogh's painting 'Starry Night', massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the first link in nearly all ocean food chains. Population explosions, or blooms, of phytoplankton, like the one shown here, occur when deep currents bring nutrients up to sunlit surface waters, fueling the growth and reproduction of these tiny plants.
It looks like the European Space Agency will finally get the delayed phase 1 (which has become phase 3) of their six phase Earth Explorers progamme launched. Meet CryoSat-2 (number one {that was once phase 1} was lost when the stage 2 rocket failed to separate from stage 1)... erm, here's the story
It was supposed to be a trailblazer, the first in a series of ‘Earth Explorers’ designed to measure and monitor the whole spectrum of processes that drive our climate. The European Space Agency’s CryoSat was going to measure, in unprecedented detail, the marine ice of the polar oceans and the ice fields of Greenland to give us, once and for all, a quantifiable measurement of their decline that even the most rabid ‘climategate’ exploiters wouldn’t be able to deny.
It looks like the European Space Agency will finally get the delayed phase 1 (which has become phase 3) of their six phase Earth Explorers progamme launched. Meet CryoSat-2 (number one {that was once phase 1} was lost when the stage 2 rocket failed to separate from stage 1)... erm, here's the story
