The waters around Istanbul are normally pretty inviting looking, but they’ve recently turned a striking shade of turquoise.
No, some prankster hasn’t dropped a whole lot of bright blue dye into the sea, but rather it’s all down to a natural phenomenon called a “phytoplankton bloom.”
The waters of the Bosporus and the Golden Hind are normally dark, but they’ve now turned an opaque tone of light blue thanks to microscopic organisms.
Berat Haznedaroglu, an environmental engineer, says it’s a normal annual event.
“This year we got a lot of rain events that carried nutrients from the Saharan desert to the Black Sea, which created an optimal environment for this phytoplankton to bloom,” said Haznedaroglu, who works at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Istanbul’s public Bogazici University.
What’s even cooler about this phenomenon is the fact that you can see it from space. Nasa published a satellite image of the Black Sea where you can see the striking colouration, saying it is “likely due to the growth of a particular phytoplankton called a coccolithophore”.
Turquoise swirls in the Black Sea. These eye-catching hues indicate the presence of organisms known as phytoplankton https://t.co/hKC0Te3TaW pic.twitter.com/151hZ04H7s
— NASA (@NASA) June 12, 2017
The microscopic organisms support fish, shellfish and other marine organisms but can also cause die-offs of marine life due to loss of oxygen from the water if the “blooms” are too widespread.
