14 DAY TRIAL // The stunning picture above shows several phytoplankton blooms as seen from space, and was made available to the public by the NASA Earth Observatory.
According to Live Science, the blooms appeared just off the coast of France, in the Bay of Biscay.
By the looks of it, it was the increase in local temperatures that caused the phytoplankton in these waters to breed and eventually form these swirls.
Once significant amounts of nutrients carried by French rivers also made their way into the Bay of Biscay, the blooms only got bigger.
Specialists explain that such blooms are usually beneficial to the environment, seeing how they constitute an important food source for numerous marine creatures.
However, whenever they get too big, they can consume too much of the oxygen in the water and therefore end up creating so-called dead zones.