Can anyone tell me what's going on in the solid-colored areas in these photographs? I took the aerial from a plane close to landing at San Francisco airport, and the satellite image shows the same area highlighted in the upper left corner. Though you can't really see it in the images, the surface of these areas was clearly water--I could see waves on it. I'm assuming they must be farms of some kind, but the only thing I know of that's commonly grown this way in the US is cranberries, and I doubt that's what's being grown in all of these areas. I'm also confused by the fact that they're adjacent to the bay, but bounded off from it by some sort of wall. So it's not bay water inside there, yet they're connected to the bay, and the walls didn't seem that high. And what's grown in salt water? Fish I guess, but would fish or their feed turn the water such colors?

By the way, has anyone else noticed deteriorating performance from Google Maps? Lately I see a lot of tiles failing to update after a change in the query or the zoom level, sometimes leaving me with a confusing if not unusable mishmash of tiles from different locations or zooms.

Update: Turns out they're salt evaporation ponds, and the colors are caused by different forms of algae that grow in different salinity conditions--the red ponds are the saltiest.