As you may remember from you physics classes, the atmosphere is a fluid just like the water in the ocean. But, unlike a flowing current of water such as the swirl of an eddy in a river, we can rarely see the shape the air makes as it passes over the land and the oceans.

So, what we see here are the vortices formed in a sheet of clouds as they pass over an island chain. Specifically, this sheet of clouds is flowing into the peak of a mountainous island, which disturbs its flow, resulting in vortices called von Karman vortices*. von Karman vortices are created whenever the flow of a fluid is disturbed by an object, resulting in two long, intertwined chains of vortices, the chains drifting downward, seeming to march methodically over an ever widening lane of air and water vapor.

In this photo, you can just see a patch of green which is the Alexander Selkirk Island. It's located in the southern Pacific Ocean.