The last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in phytoplankton blooms in our oceans – a phenomenon stemming from rising sea temperatures that can cause a loss of oxygen and light reaching the water ’ s depths . As you can probably imagine , this causes widespread suffocation of marine life .

Mapping these bloom patterns across the planet must be both thorough and extensive if it is to be accurate enough to inform environmental policymaking .

NASA is fully on-board with this plan : between 2003 and 2020 , the space agency took 760,000 photographs of these blooms , allowing for a detailed map to be generated .

Image credit : Joshua Stevens , NASA Earth Observatory Taken on November 21 , 2022 , with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS ) on NASA ’ s Terra satellite .

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