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Peter Miller from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K. confirmed via Twitter that it was caused by single-celled algae called coccolithophores.
It was identified as Emiliania huxleyi, a common non-toxic species found in almost all ocean ecosystems.
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Paul Tett, from the Scottish Association for Marine Science said, “The good news is these little algae are one of nature’s ways of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the calcareous plates take up carbon dioxide from seawater and when they sink to the bottom they are removing it from the sea and the atmosphere.”