Answer 1:
It turns out that when light is reflected off
of a stationary object, its wavelength doesn't
change (if light is reflected off of a moving
object, its wavelength can become shorter or
longer, depending on how the object is moving;
this effect is called blueshifting or
redshifting).
The surface of the ocean is not moving (waves
don't count - for redshifting or blueshifting
to occur, the reflecting object must be moving
VERY fast), and so the wavelength of the light
it reflects doesn't change (in fact, if you look
at the surface of a very still pond, it can behave
remarkably like a mirror!). So you might wonder:
what makes the ocean blue? Well, most of
the time, the light we see from the ocean is not
just light reflected from the surface, but light
that has penetrated into the water and been
scattered back out (this scattering happens as the
light bounces off of water molecules or small
particles in the water).
Now, this scattering also doesn't change the
wavelength of light, but it does affect different
wavelengths differently; in particular, shorter
wavelengths scatter much more than longer
wavelengths. Since the light that comes from
the sun contains a range of wavelengths, this
scattering process will tend to cause the shorter
wavelengths (like blue) to be scattered back out
of the water, while the longer wavelengths (like
red) will tend to penetrate deeper into the water
and get absorbed. So the blue color of ocean
water comes from the preferential scattering of
blue light rather than red, and not from any
shifting of wavelengths. (This is also the
reason the sky looks blue, by the way).
(You might have an objection: purple light has
an even shorter wavelength than blue light, so why
doesn't the ocean look purple? The answer is a
complicated combination of the relative amount of
blue vs. purple light that actually makes it
through the atmosphere to the surface of the Earth
as well as how our eyes perceive color.) Click Here to return to the search form.
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