Deep Ocean Waves Break on Sea Floor

[n2doc]

The blending and mixing of internal waves helps to explain how oceans push energy around the world.

By Larry O'Hanlon | Wed Mar 31, 2010 07:00 AM ET
For the first time, 100-foot (30-meter) tidal waves roaring at 70 miles-per-hour have been caught breaking and creating long trains of billowing turbulence more than 1,800 feet (550 meters) down along the ocean floor.

The discovery sheds light on the oceans' underappreciated internal waves and where they break in the deep sea -- something that needs to be better understood to improve global models of the oceans and Earth's climate.

"In the deep sea, it has never been observed," said Hans Van Haren of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. Van Haren and his colleague Louis Gostiaux have described their discovery in a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The direct measurements of the 100-foot billows were made on the down-current slopes of a submerged seamount near the Canary Islands over which tidal currents rage every day. The researchers detected the billowing with a string of high-speed temperature probes that picked up the denser, colder water and the less dense, warmer water tripping over each other as the tides roared down the seamount slopes.

"It's a hefty current," observed Van Haren. "I wouldn't like to be down there: (The waves) are really vigorously breaking."

http://news.discovery.com/earth/deep-ocean-waves.html

[TheMadMonk]

1. How dare they use the term "tidal wave" correctly. nt

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. I have often wondered what happened to Tidal waves

[Hosnon]

3. Rush once claimed it was a librul plot to make us all fear the environment. "Tsunami" is, after all,

much more terrifying!

Maybe he realizes the difference now...