Underwater Photography By Carlos Franco

With increasing depth underwater, sunlight is absorbed, and the amount of visible light diminishes. Because absorption is greater for long wavelengths (red end of the visible spectrum) than for short wavelengths (blue end of the visible spectrum), the colour spectrum is rapidly altered with increasing depth. White objects at the surface appear bluish underwater, and red objects appear dark, even black. Although light penetration will be less if water is turbid, in the very clear water of the open ocean less than 25% of the surface light reaches a depth of 10 m (33 feet). At 100 m (330 ft) the light present from the sun is about 0.5% of that at the surface.
The euphotic depth is the depth at which light intensity falls to 1% of the value at the surface. This depth is dependent upon water clarity, being only a few meters underwater in a turbid estuary, but may reach 200 meters in the open ocean. At the euphotic depth, plants (such as phytoplankton) have no net energy gain from photosynthesis and thus cannot grow.
At depths greater than a few hundred meters, the sun has little effect on water temperature, because the sun's energy has been absorbed by water at the surface. In the great depths of the ocean the water temperature is very cold. In fact, 75% of the water in the world ocean (the great depths) has a temperature between 0 °C and 2 °C.
Water conducts heat around twenty five times more efficiently than air. Hypothermia, a potentially fatal condition, occurs when the human body's core temperature falls below 35 °C. Insulating the body's warmth from water is the main purpose of diving suits and exposure suits when used in water temperatures below 25 °C.