The ocean is a special place where even the seemingly 'insignificant' can turn out to be an amazing treasure. . In the first part of the video I explored the beauty of the incredible symmetrical perfection of ocean salt crystals. Once the water evaporated, the salts in the ocean water drop crystallized forming the beautiful structures that you can see in the video. The crystals are formed by the minerals dissolved in the water. Ocean water has lots of minerals in its composition but the most abundant ones by far are chloride and sodium. Thus, when the water evaporates, sodium chloride crystal salts are formed. The perfect regular cube shape of the sodium chloride crystals under the microscope is just spectacularly beautiful. I could really look at them for hours! . In the second part of the video, I took a sample of beach sand and I found lots of diatoms. Diatoms are very small but they are incredibly abundant in all types of aquatic ecosystems. Diatoms are photosynthetic organisms and since they are so abundant, they produce at least 20% of the oxygen in the planet! That means that at least one fifth of the oxygen that you inhale is produced by these microscopic creatures. Diatoms are also incredibly pretty. They make glass cell walls with extraordinarily beautiful patterns. This is why even when they die, you can see the remains of diatoms in the form of their silica (glass) cell walls. . Everywhere there is something amazing to discover. There is beauty all around us. We just need to pay more attention :) . For this video I used an Olympus CX31 microscope at up to 200x magnification (in the first part of the video I used polarized light). #beach #microscopy #microscope #sodiumchloride #saltcrystals #oceansalt #microorganisms #diatoms #naturalshapes #shapesofnature #naturalpatterns #drbioforever - @dr.bioforever