The yellow and brown and green hues of the coastal waters are derived from the minute algae and other microorganisms so abundant there. Where the water is rich in plankton, it loses the glassy transparency that permits this deep penetration of the light rays.

In the journey of the light rays into deep water all the red rays and most of the yellow rays of the spectrum have been absorbed, so when the light returns to our eyes it is chiefly the cool blue rays that we see. The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness the green water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life. To the human senses, the most obvious patterning of the surface waters is indicated by color. With her uncommon gift for bridging the scientific and the poetic - a gift rooted in Carson’s conviction that science is part and particle of our spiritual bond with nature - she writes: It became the basis of her 1951 book The Sea Around Us ( public library), which won Carson the National Book Award and soon rendered her the most respected science writer in America. This lyrical, unprecedented invitation to imagine our blue planet from the perspective of nonhuman creatures - creatures that inhabit the aquatic mystery Walt Whitman called “the world below the brine” - earned Carson a book deal. In 1937, a quarter century before she catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making book Silent Spring, Carson pioneered a new storytelling aesthetic by making science a literary subject in an exquisite Atlantic Monthly essay titled Undersea. Nowhere is this chromatic cosmos richer than in the marine world, and no one has had more profound an impact on impressing its science and splendor upon the popular imagination than marine biologist and author Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964). “Each blue object could be,” Maggie Nelson observed in her stunning serenade to the most existential color, “an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe.” And yet blue itself is a universe of color - the world is woven not of blue but of blues.

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her contribution to history’s most beautiful meditations on the color blue.

Blue planet deep sea creatures yellow