These NASA images challenge what we knew about the real color of the oceans

What color is the sea? If you ask a child, he will answer without hesitation that his color is blue. If you ask an adult, although some will still answer blue, many others will say that the color is transparent, and that what children think is due to the reflection of the sky and/or the absorption and scattering of light. To complement everything a little more, NASA has shared the first images from its PACE satellite. Why don’t the oceans have the same color?

The color depends on many factors. The images that accompany us were taken hundreds of kilometers from Earth and reveal what is happening on the planet in an environmental sense. Capturing a direct image of any ocean is not the same as one released through short-wave infrared, also showing the reflected light in colors not perceptible to the human eye.

Another example occurs in areas of the Arctic, where the thawing of permafrost and the flow of carbon-rich water is causing part of the ocean to emit more CO2 than it absorbs. Even the color can vary simply due to depth, which in turn causes the light to hit the seabed in a completely different way. What’s more, there are cases where the blue hue is lost due to processes such as eutrophication (proliferation of algae and depletion of oxygen in the precious commodity).

PACE, measuring the health of the planet. On February 8, NASA launched the PACE satellite (“Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem”) as part of a mission whose priority is to provide all types of key measurements related to climate, air quality or the way that light is reflected in the waters that cross the oceans.

Therefore, the satellite is a first and important step in science to obtain faster data collection systems, providing a global assessment of the composition of various aerosol particles in the atmosphere (which in turn will or will not eliminate the importance of these actors in, for example, the rise in temperatures). Thus, with these first images we obtain the true visual appearance of the oceans from Earth’s orbit.

The ocean and climate change. As we see in the images, with satellite data we will be able to study microscopic life in the ocean and particles in the air, thus advancing our understanding of issues such as the health of fisheries, harmful algal blooms, air pollution or smoke from forest fires. In addition, one can also investigate how the ocean and atmosphere interact with each other and are affected by climate change.

Observing the ocean like never before. Through the satellite’s Ocean Color Instrument, researchers can observe the ocean, land and atmosphere through a spectrum of ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. While previous color satellites could only detect a handful of wavelengths in the oceans, PACE detects more than 200 wavelengths.

In fact, with this extensive spectral range, they can identify specific phytoplankton communities, a key mission of the satellite, since different species play a wide variety of roles in the ecosystem and the carbon cycle (and in some cases, are even detrimental to human health).

Image | NASA PACE

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