These NASA images challenge what we knew about the actual 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, while some will still answer blue, many others will say that the color is transparent and that what children think has to do with the reflection of the sky and/or the absorption and scattering of light. In addition, NASA shared the first images from its PACE satellite. Why aren’t the oceans the same color?

Color depends on many factors. The images accompanying us were taken hundreds of kilometers from Earth and reveal what is happening on the planet in an ecological sense. Taking a direct image of any ocean is not the same as an image taken through short-wave infrared, which also shows reflected light in colors not visible to the human eye.

Another example occurs in areas of the Arctic, where thawing permafrost and the flow of carbon-rich water cause part of the ocean to release more CO2 than it absorbs. Even color can change simply due to depth, which in turn causes light to hit the seafloor in a completely different way. Moreover, there are times when the blue hue is lost due to processes such as eutrophication (algae growth and depletion of oxygen in the precious product).

PACE, which measures the health of the planet. On February 8, NASA launched the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) satellite on a mission that prioritizes providing all types of key measurements related to climate, air quality or the way light is reflected in the atmosphere. waters crossing oceans.

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

Ocean and climate change. As we see in the images, satellite data will allow us to study microscopic life in the ocean and particles in the air, thereby deepening our understanding of issues such as fisheries health, harmful algal blooms, air pollution or forest smoke. fires. Additionally, one can also explore how the ocean and atmosphere interact with each other and are affected by climate change.

Observe the ocean like never before. Using the Ocean Color Instrument satellite, researchers can observe the ocean, land and atmosphere in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. While previous color satellites could detect only a few wavelengths in the oceans, PACE detects more than 200 wavelengths.

In fact, using this broad spectral range, they can identify specific phytoplankton communities, which is a key mission of the satellite since different species play a wide variety of roles in the ecosystem and carbon cycle (and in some cases are even harmful to humans). health).

Image | NASA PACE

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