Reader Questions

Reader Question: Waves Breaking

As a follow-up to the recent waves post, reader robotslenderman asks:

What does it look like when the wave breaks? And why do waves sometimes push us back? Why are we able to ride them?

I wasn’t able to find an equivalent breaking wave version of that dyed wave – side note: readers with flumes, please feel free to make one and share it! – but here’s an undyed breaking wave for our reference.

Waves break, or get that white, frothy look, when they reach shallower water. In the previous post, the waves we saw were effectively deep-water waves, so they didn’t change in height as they rolled across the tank. Here there’s an incline to simulate a beach, which causes the water to slow down and steepen. That forms the characteristic curl of a plunging breaker, seen here.

At the beach, a wave runs out of water to pass through and all the energy that wave was carrying has to go somewhere. Some is lost as heat, some turns into the sound of that classic crashing wave, and a lot of it gets dissipated as turbulence that pushes us, sand, shells, and anything else its way.

As for why we can ride waves, there’s some special physics at play when it comes to surfing. To catch a wave, a surfer has to paddle hard to get up to the wave’s speed just as it reaches them. Too slow and the wave will just pass them by, leaving them bobbing more or less in place. (Image credit: T. Shand, source)

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