It's the eighth year the Beaker Street Festival's Science Photography Prize has told the story of one of the more remote places on Earth, Australia's southern island state of Tasmania. This image is one of the finalists, and I think it's my favorite!
This photo was taken by Luke Brokensha. In the photo we can see a single-celled calcifying phytoplankton (Calcidiscus leptoporus).
Calcidiscus leptoporus - a coccolithophore found drifting in the Southern Ocean. Coccolithophores are single celled organisms which perform photosynthesis for the creation of energy, which in turn produces the oxygen that we breathe. They construct many intricate plates of armour - made of calcium carbonate - which they cover themselves with to protect their delicate internal cell from predation. It's a stunning look at a lifeform we're unlikely to ever see in our lives.
This image was taken using a Scanning Electron Microscope, from a sample collected by the Southern Ocean Continuous Plankton Recorder program (SO-R).
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