It Turns Out This Is the Reason Why Seawater Is Often Blue

Depending on time and place, seawater has different colors from turquoise, green, blue, navy blue to gray and brown. This article explains the key facts and context behind sea water is blue.

Key Facts About Sea Water Is Blue

Glenn Smith, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in the United States, actually has no color, but because it reflects the blue of the sky, when we see them green. Therefore, when the sky has many gray clouds, the sea water is gray.

Sunlight is made up of light of 7 colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. When sunlight shines on the sea surface, the water molecule absorbs light with longer wavelengths like red and orange light better. And short-wavelength light such as blue and violet light is less absorbed by water molecules, when encountering obstacles of seawater, one after another scatters around or reflexes. The deeper the seawater is, the more blue light is scattered and reflected.

Part of the light scattered or reflected when coming to the eye of the observer will make us see that the sea water is always green.

Why Sea Water Is Blue Matters

In addition, there are Red Sea and Black Sea on Earth. The reason is that in the Red Sea area there is a red seaweed that lives and thrives, while in the Black Sea area, seawater contains a lot of H2S (darkening the seawater starting from a depth of about 100m or less).

So why is the wave white?

The pieces of glass after the cup breaks are transparent and colorless, but when you put them together, you will see them as a white pile. Moreover, the smaller the glass pieces, the more white the pile is, the more white the color will be, even when crushed into glass beads (like powder) it will look like a pile of snow.

The reason is that glass can penetrate sunlight and also reflect. Therefore, when light shines through a glass pile, in addition to reflections, there are many refractive waves, and the light after experiencing many times the philosophy will refract or scatter out in different directions. When this light reaches the human eye, it makes us feel white.

This happens similar to ocean waves, it also causes the light to blur, so when we see the waves will be white.