Whoa! What are these weird whirlpools spotted by satellites on opposite sides of the planet?

Satellite image of green vortex swirling in the Gulf of Finland on July 18. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) I hope you'll excuse the exaggerated exuberance in the headline, but when I saw the image above, and then the animation lower down in this story, my first reaction really was to exclaim out loud "whoa!" I was really struck by the two very curious whirlpool-like features on opposite sides of Earth — one gigantic the other small, one eerily green and the other swirling over a red desert. And so I decided to try to shoehorn them into one ImaGeo post! Here goes... At first, the glowing green whirlpool seen in the image above seemed wondrous: It turns out to be a giant bloom of phytoplankton in the Gulf of Finland that has been swirled into a vortex by an ocean eddy. It was imaged on July 18, 2018 by the the Landsat 8 satellite, according to a NASA Earth Observatory story.