Why does water seem to get bluer the warmer or colder it gets, like in the Caribbean or the Arctic?

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Why does water seem to get bluer the warmer or colder it gets, like in the Caribbean or the Arctic?

In: Earth Science

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is a good question. I don’t know exactly but I have been told by fishermen that the darker waters have more microscopic life, therefore a more healthy ecosystem. (Hilton head are of SC doesn’t have very pretty water but it’s got a lot of diversity as opposed to Caribbean Islands that are beautiful but lack diversity). But I don’t know how accurate that is. I’m looking forward to a good answer

Anonymous 0 Comments

The really turquoise blue water comes from seeing things under it, such as white sand, ice, etc.

Very deep water is a very dark blue colour. And many areas you may be thinking of have very sharp drops into the water and go rapidly to deep water and/or they have dark rock or dark sand for a bottom.

The Caribbean has large shelf’s of very white sand so has large areas of very light water.

But also, opaque water that has a lot of sediment also can be dark as it’s not as transparent. Equatorial water tends to be very transparent and so bottoms show better, while areas like the Pacific Northwest are full of life and have lots of sediment.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Bluer as opposed to what? If you mean the seagreen you have in ports and along beaches, then that colour probably comes from algae or suspended detritus.

I imagine that around the arctic it is too cold for them to live, so they can’t colour the water. the same might be true for very warm water, but not the range of temperatures most seawater reaches.

–Water’s blue colour comes from the same thing that makes the sky blue. Light being bent by the water, so the more water i.e. the deeper the water the deeper the blue gets. Up to a point at least.–
Ignore this bit. Apparently wrong.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Eva01beast has the best answer so far, but it does leave a few things out. The microscopic stuff that lives in water that we can’t see also colors it. There are lots of places where the water is more or less clear because of temperature or salinity. Blue Lake in Oregon is extremely cold and you can see 300′ to the bottom because nothing lives in it. The gulf is much more saline than most oceans and that causes some of the clarity as well as the general shallowness.