Why are waterfalls white?

Why are waterfalls white? If you had given the question just a moment of thought, “bubbles” might have popped in your mind, or floated, um, no pun intended, and you would be right.

But why, you might ask, are bubbles white? Water, after all, is transparent.

Because the bubble is shiny, light is reflected off its outer surface. Because the bubble is also transparent, some of the light enters the bubble where again, it is reflected off the shiny inner surface of the bubble. (Light also gets “refracted” as it enters the bubble but is not important for our purposes here.) In other words, light is bounced all around in and off the bubble. Put very many bubbles together and you get light scattering in all directions making the bubbles appear white.

That is as much as I gleaned from my online research. But it still does not answer the question of why bubbles are white. Why not blue or green or maybe a light shade of magenta?

The color white, they say, is the presence of all colors. (Black the absence.) Shine white light onto one side of a prism and out the other side comes all the colors of the rainbow (as different colors—or “wavelengths” in science-speak—inside the white light “refract”—another science-speak—at different angles). So there–white is the presence of all colors.

From this I surmise that put very many bubbles together and with light of different colors bouncing off in all directions, the colors fuse or merge or blend together as they reach our eyes and so form the color white.

Isn’t that neat?

Anyways, how often do you see the color white in Nature? Coconut meat is white. So is pearl. And so are some flowers. But they’re small. In massive scales, you’d probably only see white in snowy countries. If you’re from the tropics like me, you’re out of luck. White is pretty much absent in Nature.

Unless you go visit a waterfall.

So thank Creation for the waterfall. A beauty in Nature resplendent that you can expect to find anywhere there is water—abundant in our blue ball planet—cascading down rocks. And when you visit a waterfall, think maybe not just of communing and reveling in Nature\’s powerful roar, but also of bathing in her shining white light.