Why is the ocean blue???

Answer 1

because it reflects the color of the sky.

Answer 2

There are several theories:

* Blue wavelengths are absorbed the least by the deep ocean water and are scattered and reflected back to the observer’s eye
* Particles in the water may help to reflect blue light
* The ocean reflects the blue sky

Most of the time the ocean appears to be blue because this is the color our eyes see. But the ocean can be many other colors depending upon particles in the water, the depth of the water, and the amount of skylight.

The colors we see depend upon the reflection of the visible wavelengths of light to our eyes.

Wavelengths of light pass through matter differently depending on the material’s composition. Blue wavelengths are transmitted to greater depths of the ocean, while red wavelengths are absorbed quickly. Water molecules scatter blue wavelengths by absorbing the light waves, and then rapidly reemitting the light waves in different directions. That is why there are mostly blue wavelengths that are reflected back to our eyes.

Sometimes oceans look green. This may be because there is an abundance of plant life or sediment from rivers that flow into the ocean. The blue light is absorbed more and the yellow pigments from plants mix with the blue light waves to produce the color green.

Sometimes parts of the oceans will look milky brown after a storm passes. This is because winds and currents associated with the storm churn up sand and sediment from the rivers that lead into the oceans.

The surface of seas and lakes often reflect blue skylight, making them appear bluer. [[[ Montana reflection.]]] The relative contribution of reflected skylight and the light scattered back from the depths is strongly dependent on observation angle.However this is prominent only at relatively low angles and when the water is smooth.

Answer 3

if someone were to ask you what color is the ocean, you would say blue and for most of the world's oceans, you'd be correct. we see color when light is reflected by the things arounds us. white light is made up of a spectrum of colors such as in a rainbow. the longer the wavelengths of light are red and the shorter wavelenghts, blue. the same applies to the ocean, when sunlight hits the ocean, some of it is reflected back directly ( sunglint ) but most of it penetrates the surface and interacts with the water molecules that it encounters. most of the light is reflected back out into the clear, open ocean water is blue while the red portion is absorbed near the surface. however, for the most part, the most important influence of the world's ocean result from phytoplankton. the basic principle behind the remote sensing of ocean's color is this; the more phytoplankton, the greener it is, the less phytoplankton, the bluer it is.

Answer 4

Most of the time the ocean appears to be blue because this is the color our eyes see. But the ocean can be many other colors depending upon particles in the water, the depth of the water, and the amount of skylight.

The colors we see depend upon the reflection of the visible wavelengths of light to our eyes.

Answer 5

The ocean is blue because of the reflection off of our atmosphere. And the sky is blue because our o-zone layer which is made up of primarly O3. Now O3 or 3 Oxygen molocules bound together handles light a very specific way. When light hits the O3 molocules in our atmosphere, much like when light hits a crystal, it bends the light only allowing a certian wave length to escape. And in the case of the sky, that wave length coresponds to Blue.

Answer 6

Sunlight is made up of all the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Some of the sunlight is reflected off the surface of the water, reflecting the color of the sky. Some of the sunlight penetrates the water and is scattered by ripples and particles in the water (this tinges the appearance of the ocean with the color of the particles). In deep water, much of the sunlight is scattered by the oxygen in the water, and this scatters more of the blue light.

Water absorbs more of the red light in sunlight; the water also enhances the scattering of blue light.

Some Oddly-Colored Seas:
The Red Sea often looks red because of red algae that live in this sea.
The Black Sea looks almost black because it has a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide (which appears black).

Answer 7

The sky is blue partly because air scatters short-wavelength light in preference to longer wavelengths. Combined, these effects scatter (bend away in all directions) some short, blue light waves while allowing almost all longer, red light waves to pass straight through. When we look toward a part of the sky not near the sun, the blue color we see is blue light waves scattered down toward us from the white sunlight passing through the air overhead. Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even yellow light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red.

Scattering and absorption are major causes of the attenuation of radiation by the atmosphere. Scattering varies as a function of the ratio of the particle diameter to the wavelength of the radiation. When this ratio is less than about one-tenth, Rayleigh scattering occurs in which the scattering coefficient varies inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength. At larger values of the ratio of particle diameter to wavelength, the scattering varies in a complex fashion described, for spherical particles, by the Mie theory; at a ratio of the order of 10, the laws of geometric optics begin to apply.

Why is the sky blue instead of violet?
Because of the strong wavelength dependence (inverse fourth power) of light scattering according to Raleigh's Law, one would expect that the sky would appear more violet than blue, the former having a shorter wavelength than the latter. There is a simple physiological explanation for this apparent conundrum. Simply put, the human eye cannot detect violet light in presence of light with longer wavelengths. There is a reason for this. It turns out that the human eye's high resolution color-detection system is made of proteins and chromophores (which together make up photoreceptor cells or "Cone" structures in the eye's fovea) that are sensitive to different wavelengths in the visible spectrum (400 nm–700 nm). In fact, there are three major protein-chromophore sensors that have peak sensitivities to yellowish-green (564 nm), bluish-green (534 nm), and blue-violet (420 nm) light. The brain uses the different responses of these chromophores to interpret the spectrum of the light that reaches the retina.

When one experimentally plots the sensitivity curves for the three color sensors (identified here as long (L), middle (M), and short (S) wavelength), three roughly "bell-curve" distributions are seen to overlap one another and cover the visible spectrum. We depend on this overlap for color sensing to detect the entire spectrum of visible light. For example, monochromatic violet light at 400 nm mostly stimulates the S receptors, but also slightly stimulates the L and M receptors, with the L receptor having the stronger response. This combination of stimuli is interpreted by the brain as violet. Monochromatic blue light, on the other hand, stimulates the M receptor more than the L receptor. Skylight is not monochromatic; it contains a mixture of light covering much of the spectrum. The combination of strong violet light with weaker blue and even weaker green and yellow strongly stimulates the S receptor, and stimulates the M receptor more than the L receptor. As a result, this mixture of wavelengths is perceived by the brain as blue rather than violet.

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Answer 8

Because blue light isn't filtered out by the water as fast as shorter wave length light.

Answer 9

The Suns make it blue

Answer 10

Cause of the millions of drowned Smurfs !!