Scientists Think the Ocean Looked Green 600 Million Years Ago
For surfers, 'green waves' are where it's at. The place on a breaking wave where the actual surfing gets done, as opposed to the whitewater. But hundreds of millions of years ago, most of the ocean was literally green, more so than it is today. And it's possible that color could eventually return to the world's oceans.
That's according to new research from scientists at Nagoya University in Japan, who published their findings in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. They believe there were several factors at work between 3 billion years and 600 million years ago. Namely, during the planet's first few billion years the oceans had lots of iron hydroxide, a compound that absorbs blue light.This planet's greenish-hue was compounded by aquatic cyanobacteria. This type of bacteria behaves like a plant in that they photosynthesize sunlight and have a pigment called chlorophyll, which absorbs red and blue wavelengths and reflects green light. So with iron hydroxide and cyanobacteria, Earth effectively had a 'green light window,' Taro Matsuro, the study's lead author, told New Scientist.Interestingly, there's a theory that the ocean could, at some point, get that greenish hue again. As noted by Darren Orf in Popular Mechanics, 'A 2019 study conducted by MIT suggested that by the century's end, half the world's oceans would turn green due to rising phytoplankton populations as the world warms. In 2023, a follow-up study confirmed that 56 percent of the world's oceans had already greened in just the past 20 years.'
So while the idea of green lineups sounds cool in theory, they come with all the baggage of climate change. Best to keep the green waves in the tropics.
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