As the seasons and years pass on Earth, different species tend to dominate the landscape at different times. Such is the case in summer in the surface waters of the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia and Russia. NASA satellites recently captured a transitional moment between one form of microscopic, plant-like organisms (phytoplankton) and another as summer water conditions changed.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a natural-color image (above) of phytoplankton blooming in the waters off of Norway and Russia on July 10, 2014. Note the green swirls in the water on the center and left, while milky blue-white swirls color the upper right. Though it is impossible to know the types of phytoplankton without sampling the water directly, previous analyses of satellite images suggest that the green plankton were likely diatoms and the white ones were probably coccolithophores...