[HN Gopher] Low-latitude oceans have become greener in the past ...
___________________________________________________________________
Low-latitude oceans have become greener in the past 20 years: study
Author : myshpa
Score : 28 points
Date : 2023-09-03 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| wilg wrote:
| Is lightening the albedo of the sea helping reflect light and
| reducing global warming? I know this is a thing with, for
| example, forests which absorb more heat versus desert.
| thechao wrote:
| Hah! What if Homer's "wine-dark seas" really were wine-dark!?
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe it's more indicative of the wine color at the time than
| the sea color. ;)
| twoodfin wrote:
| My guess is that it's about drawing contrast with the
| crystal-blue seas near the Greek shore.
|
| The difference between the Mediterranean as experienced along
| the shoals of a beach vs. out among the waves is night and
| day.
|
| Not unlike the difference between a glass of water and a
| glass of (surely murky in the era) wine.
| bitwize wrote:
| Hackernews told me it's because the Greeks couldn't see the
| color blue -- and neither could anyone else until we invented
| a word for it.
| sidlls wrote:
| That's physically impossible. The color receptors in our
| eyes are unlikely to have spontaneously gained the ability
| to process blue wavelength light only after a word was
| invented for it. More likely is that people simply didn't
| use a separate word to distinguish colors of wavelengths
| between green and violet.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There are many languages where there is a single word for
| green and blue, but Greek was not one of those languages.
|
| Since the earliest texts, Greek had distinct words for
| blue and green, even if many modern authors have confused
| them, because they did not compare enough texts to be
| able to understand the correspondences between words and
| colors.
|
| Ancient Greek was not uniform, there were many dialects,
| so there are many authors who use different words for
| colors.
|
| Blue was frequently described as the color of the pigment
| ultramarine blue or more rarely as the color of the sky.
| For green there were more words, some of whom have
| uncertain meaning, like "chloros", which is used in many
| modern terms for green, but which might have meant
| something else in Greek. The words whose meaning is
| certain describe green as the color of grass or as the
| color of emeralds or as the color of leek.
| Tenoke wrote:
| While likely still wrong, Sapir-worf doesn't state that
| you developed the receptors at the same time but rather
| that things were processed/compressed/remembered
| differently when/if there was a single word for e.g. blue
| and purple.
|
| It's closer (if we steelman a bit) to how if I think of
| different shades of purple as just purple I might not
| notice a difference between 2 objects while someone else
| would immediately tell that one is lavender and the other
| wisteria.
| thechao wrote:
| Your latter example (but with green) is a testable
| hypothesis, with some weak support for being true! The
| rest of S-W is popsci garbage.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Reminds me of this old image (can't find the original
| link, but it's the same picture) that jokes about the
| difference between men and women with names for colours:
|
| https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/style
| s/a...
|
| Oh, and of course the xkcd follow-up:
| https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
| bitwize wrote:
| Fuchsia was named after a botanist named Leonhard Fuchs.
| To remember its spelling I think of Fred Fuchs, aka Fred
| Fucks from the AVGN videos, and then add -ia.
| adrian_b wrote:
| This is a myth generated by people with little knowledge of
| chemistry and mineralogy, which prevented them to
| understand the Greek words that they were reading.
|
| Already in Homer, the Greek word for blue was frequently
| used: "cuaneos", which means "the color of cuanos".
| "Cuanos" is a word borrowed by the Greeks from Anatolia and
| which initially designated the blue pigment now named
| "ultramarine blue", which was imported from Afghanistan.
| Later, the same word was also applied to other cheaper blue
| pigments used as a substitute for the expensive ultramarine
| blue, like azurite and the Egyptian blue.
|
| English has the word "cyan", which is derived from the
| Greek word for blue, but which is now erroneously used with
| the meaning of blue-green. The Greeks and the Romans
| described blue-green as the color of the beryls, or of
| turquoise, or of the littoral sea. They never used
| "cuaneos", i.e. "cyan", for blue-green.
|
| Unfortunately there are many dictionaries with erroneous
| explanations for Greek words referring to chemical
| substances, minerals, animals or plants, because the
| philologists who have worked at the dictionaries have not
| consulted experts in the other sciences.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Yes. The flag of Greece also suggests some fondness for
| blue (as does its architecture).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece
| tremon wrote:
| I prefer this reading:
| https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea
|
| > Rather than being ignorant of color, it seems that the
| Greeks were less interested in and attentive to hue, or
| tint, than they were to light. As late as the fourth
| century BC, Plato named the four primary colors as white,
| black, red, and bright, and in those cases where a Greek
| writer lists colors "in order," they are arranged not by
| the Newtonian colors of the rainbow [..] but from lightest
| to darkest.
|
| > The phrase "winelike," then, had little to do with color
| but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would
| resonate with an audience familiar with the sea [..] such
| as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness,
| like wine in a terracotta vessel.
|
| (located at about 70% of the text. Ctrl-F "Plato" for the
| impatient)
| layer8 wrote:
| It would be nice to see some before-after pictures.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| >Generally, waters that are deep blue reflect very little life,
| whereas greener waters indicate the presence of ecosystems, and
| mainly phytoplankton--plant-like microbes that are abundant in
| upper ocean and that contain the green pigment chlorophyll. The
| pigment helps plankton harvest sunlight, which they use to
| capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into
| sugars.
|
| This is a negative feedback on global warming?
| wseqyrku wrote:
| How did you come up with that connection?
| petermcneeley wrote:
| I was quoting from the reference article
| https://phys.org/news/2023-07-ocean-consequence-climate.html
| formvoltron wrote:
| article says "we predicted it" but.. "we don't know what is
| causing it... " eh?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-03 23:01 UTC)