Everything is illuminated: Charlotte Elisa Schaum

Jules Vernes once wrote a book that became known as “Le Rayon Vert (The green ray)”, describing a phenomenon that has recently gained popularity in the Pirates of the Caribbean’s latest movie. Fishermen and pirates alike thought the Green Flash to be a sign of a much beloved (or much feared) soul coming back to this world, from the dead. It is, however, a simple physical phenomenon, rare in this day and age due to air pollution. It is loved by oceanographers and the occasional astronomer alike. At the sea, or near coasts with an uninterrupted view through a clear and unpolluted sky, the sun’s red light is split into its fractions close to dusk and dawn. The fractions of the setting or rising sun’s light are hues of red, green and blue, with the reddish yellow light building a center rimmed by green and blue. As the sun keeps going down, red, long-wavelength light vanishes first, followed by green, and then blue light, which has the shortest wavelength of the three. But the atmosphere causes blue light to be scattered more than red or green – the reason why the sky appears blue – so what remains in the end is green, and for a split second the sky above the horizon turns surrealistically green. Even Salvador Dalí, mastermind of everything surrealistic never captured anything like this on canvas. Depending on the weather and exact composition of the atmosphere, the interaction of reflection and fractioning of light may well result in a blue to purple ray of light.

Once the sun has set….

Once the sun has set, the sea starts to brim with the light of a multitude of organisms, which pull their perpetual all-nighter in the salty depths. Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living organism and fairly common in marine plants and animals. Some of the most well known bioluminescent marine species are actually very small algae carrying flagella. Their scientific name, dinoflagellates, either derives from the Greek which means whirling and describes their moving patterns fairly well, or is an apt description of their cell covering, which bears a remarkable similarity to dinosaur skin. Two prominent dinoflagellate species are Noctiluca scintillans (literally “glowing at night” aka “Fire of the Seas”) and Pyrocystis fusiformis (“little sack of fire”). Upon being touched by water or a boat or an animal passing by, the dinoflagellates start to emit a lasting green-blue glow. As these organisms are by no means prone to solitude and life as a hermit, but usually occur in thousands and thousands, an entire wave or all the water surrounding anything that moves may well start to glow.
Sure enough, the deep sea with an average depth of 4 kilometres is a place of eternal darkness, apart from those special areas scattered on the ocean floor where plate tectonics pull the very ground apart with elemental force, causing the red-hot interior of the earth to spill into the cold gloom. Clever organisms have evolved in the dim, and are a-glow in green and blue and occasionally red. Jellyfish, sea cucumbers, crustaceans, fish, sea snails and bristle worms send messages as strangely beautiful as news from another universe. In depths of 5 kilometres and more, all the flashing, glowing, flickering and twinkling, reflecting, absorbing and fractioning is taken place for reasons that do not lack a certain aspect of drama. Under the sea, it is all about eat or be eaten, about love (or rather about finding a genetically suitable partner so as to ensure the survival of the species) and often about life and death.
Those who cannot shine themselves or do not keep glowing organisms in symbiosis have to remain in the dark, and probably hope to be illuminated soon.

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