You're explaining to a younggster at the seashore why the water is cyan colored.The youngster points to the whitecaps of overturning waves and ask why they are white. what is your answer?

Answer 1

The color of deep water is due to the subtraction of the colors from light that penetrates deeply into the water, and is then scattered back out by small particles far beneath the surface of the water (typically meters to tens of meters). Sea foam of whitecaps reflects white light because is it a inhomogeneous mixture of water and air. Absorption does not play much of a role, because the layer of foam that the light penetrates before being scattered is too small to do much absorbing.