I understand why the ocean and lakes are blue, water absorbs red light out of the spectrum so it appease “blue” to over simplify. But is water in a glass, or drops of rain, look clear? What’s the difference?
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Water is always the same color, more or less. The apparent difference comes from a bunch of combined factors:
* Volume. Water is not actually perfectly clear. It’s got a very slight tint to it, so when you see a whole lot of water in one place, it’s like looking through a series of many color filters stacked on top of one another.
* Reflection. Water is somewhat reflective and the sky often appears blue-ish. Water, on a day with a blue sky, can look bluer than normal.
* Contaminants. Lots of stuff gets mixed and dissolved into water, any of which can change its color or simply make it more opaque. Salt or sand or silt or industrial pollution or…etc… Of course, those won’t necessarily make it appear *blue*, but it’ll give water *a* color.
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