Discovery: Why Strange, Chalky Swirls Cover the Southern Ocean
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | December 1, 2017 01:53pm ET
Behold the Great Calcite Belt, ring around the Southern Ocean, coverer of 16 percent of all the global seas, and shiny bloom of microscopic phytoplankton so large it's best seen from space.
Organisms called coccolithophores — tiny, single-celled photosynthesizers that are neither plants nor bacteria — dominate those microscopic swarms, researchers recently discovered.
https://www.livescience.com/61077-great-calcite-belt-algae-explained.html