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

NASA satellite adds new information about what we knew about the seas crossing our planet’s 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?

Closer to the eastern tip of the Mediterranean Sea, a variety of relief is found. The Nile Delta (bottom left) stands out in green in the Egyptian desert. Green patches can also be seen along the coasts of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. In the center of the image is the island of Cyprus, located south of Turkey.

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.

Phytoplankton bloom from space in the Gulf of Oman

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).


The Kamchatka Peninsula, located on the eastern edge of Russia, covers an area roughly the size of Colorado but contains more than 100 volcanoes scattered across 1,000 kilometers of territory.

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.

Both images include Japan’s second largest island, Hokkaido, and the Russian island to the north, Sakhalin. On the left is the actual color image. On the right, the short-wave infrared image shows reflected light in colors that the human eye is not sensitive to.

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.

The snow-capped Verkhoyansk mountain range and braided rivers create stark visual contrasts in this image taken in a remote region of Siberia.

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.

Here, ice clouds and snow are purple, liquid clouds are pink, water is black, barren soil is brown, and vegetated areas are dark red (like the top right).

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.

The colors in this image are processed to enhance the green tones of the ocean. Why do we care about this ocean green? Because they are an important sign of the productivity of our ocean ecosystem and therefore a key indicator of ocean health.

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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