If you asked a random person about the color of the ocean, they would probably tell you that it’s some shade of blue or green. But perhaps that shade of blue looks slightly different to you than it does to the random stranger you’re bothering about the color of the ocean. The way you see color depends on many things: the way an object interacts with incoming light, the color of that incoming light, and even the way your eyes perceive that light. The stranger likely has cone cells in their eyes that perceive light differently than yours. When light from the sun enters the ocean, it is scattered or absorbed by phytoplankton (microscopic organisms in the ocean that produce oxygen, take up carbon dioxide, and serve as the base of the marine food web), organic matter, minerals, and other constituents in the water, as well as the water itself.
