Re: The blueness of water

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Larry Woolf wrote:

> A sufficiently high concentration of colored particles or plant matter
> suspended in water will certainly give water the color of the particles or
> plants.
>
> But typical bodies of water are blue because water is a selective absorber -

I don't know if this is true.  "Typical" bodies of water, i.e. the ocean,
are blue because of impurities.  Na+ and Cl+ aren't the only ions in salt
water.  With swimming pools, the water is not salty but it's not distilled
water, so we certainly can't use them as an example of the color of
mineral-free water.


Last time this debate appeared on phys-L, I said what I'll say now:  the
swimming-pool reactor at Cornell looked very odd, it did not look the
color of swimming-pool water.  The walls of the tank were not painted
blue, and there were underwater floodlights.  The water looked like a
block of colorless glass.  It was only blue near the bottom (I vaugely
remember that it was 40ft deep, but I could be wrong.)

Also: nearly all the swimming pools I've seen have been painted sky blue.
This is quite apparent when looking at suburbs out of aircraft windows.
The occasional white-bottom pool is interesting because the shallow end is
far less blue than the deep end.

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