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Mysterious White Spots Are Appearing in the Ocean—But Nobody Knows Why

maximus otter

Recovering policeman
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Scientists have spotted a mysterious uptick in the appearance of unexplained patches of white water in the shallow waters off the coast of the Bahamas, reports a new study based on satellite observations.

For almost a century, people have observed these so-called “whiting” events, which typically cover an area equivalent to a few hundred football fields, but nobody knows the exact cause of this phenomenon. Samples show that the discoloration is caused by fine-grained calcium carbonate that floats over the Bahama Banks, which are carbonate structures that surround the archipelago, but it’s not clear why the grain clouds sporadically appear in the ocean.

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In addition to spotting these long-term patterns, the team found a large range of sizes and timeframes for the whiting events. Some patches vanished after a few days, while others stuck around for as long as three months. And while the smallest events cover a mere fraction of a square mile, the white discoloration regularly extended across more than 150 square miles from 2014 to 2015, an area roughly equivalent to the city of Detroit, Michigan.

Those huge white patches represented the zenith of an overall increase in the total area of the whiting events that occurred from 2003 to 2015. After 2015, the occurrence of such large patches gradually tapered off, reaching an average size of about 10 square miles by 2020.
The seasonal and decadal patterns revealed by the study are certainly tantalizing, but they haven’t yet unlocked the origin of the events.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epz...e-appearing-in-the-ocean-and-nobody-knows-why

maximus otter
 
I was always told that the environment which became our Downlands was like the Bahamas, once.
 
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