Im touched by the invention of the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, to measure the blueness of the sky. In 1760, when he was 20 years old, he climbed the Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. At the time, mountain climbers had observed that as they climbed higher, the sky turned a deeper blue. “Ce phénomène m’avoit souvent frappé” Saussure wrote. “This phenomenon had often struck me” and as he prepared to summit Mont Blanc, he wanted a way to measure the color of the sky. He brought with him pieces of paper colored different shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its color. He named this instrument ‘Cyanometer’. Later Alexander von Humboldt used it at his expeditions. The Cyanometer helped lead to a successful conclusion that the blueness of the sky is a measure of transparency caused by the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
An analog instrument measuring nature and our environment. Intrinsic immeasurability of some geographic phenomena. For me this feels like a sublime way of interacting with the environment.
Blue is a mysterious, transient colour and yet it is the deepest in the colour spectrum. It is the most insubstantial colour and rarely occurs in the natural world except as a translucency. The ocean looks blue because red, orange and yellow which have long wavelength light, are absorbed more strongly by water than is blue which has short wavelength light. When white light from the sun enters the ocean, it is mostly the blue that is visible. Same reason the sky is blue. A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter other light. This also occurs with compressed glacier ice and leaves icebergs appear bluish.