Beachlife

Today, Cristina and me went to the beach. After a couple of weeks with temperatures of around 25° C the water is now very comfortable for swimming. It still feels pretty amazing to live just one block away from here !



This beach is a pebble beach, as you can see in the picture. This is a little less comfortable than your average sandy beach, but then again, you're not full of sand everywhere when going home.

Another feature of the beach here is the exceptional colour of the water. Near shore it is really, very blue. Azure coast, aha. What could cause this colour? It's not only near shore; in waters further out, the trail of a boat has this colour, as we'd seen going to Corsica. A possible explanation is that it is phytoplankton blooming, as in this satellite picture of the Bay of Biscay:



However it seems those phytoplankton do not bloom all the time, and judging from the picture above, they do not particularly stick to the shores. Maybe it is silt from the bottom, as explains the NASA Oceanography site:

In coastal areas, runoff from rivers, resuspension of sand and silt from the bottom by tides, waves and storms and a number of other substances can change the color of the near-shore waters.

The sea here is very salty indeed, more so anyway than the Atlantic ocean at the coast of Maranhão, where Cristina comes from. I'll go for the silt explanation; if you know better please let me know !

And here are some more of today's pictures: