“The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, color woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). First publication: between 1826 and 1833. Current location Library of Congress. Photo source: ©© Wikipedia
Excerpts;
X- and Y-shaped ocean waves that are often seen at beaches may help explain why tsunamis can be so devastating, researchers say.
Ocean waves can sometimes interact to yield ripples that are much taller than the simply added combined heights of their originating waves, a sign of what researchers call “nonlinear interactions.” (If they were linear, the wave heights would simply add together.) In shallow waters, most of these unusually tall waves look like an X or a Y from above, or like two connected Ys.
Scientists thought these waves were rare in nature. Now mathematicians Mark Ablowitz and Douglas Baldwin at the University of Colorado at Boulder find they are surprisingly common, happening all the time, and have developed model equations that describe them…
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“Nonlinear shallow ocean-wave soliton interactions on flat beaches,” Study Physical Review E
Ocean waves are complex and often turbulent. While most ocean-wave interactions are essentially linear, sometimes two or more waves interact in a nonlinear way. For example, two or more waves can interact and yield waves that are much taller than the sum of the original wave heights. Most of these shallow-water nonlinear interactions look like an X or a Y or two connected Ys; at other times, several lines appear on each side of the interaction region. It was thought that such nonlinear interactions are rare events: they are not. Here we report that such nonlinear interactions occur every day, close to low tide, on two flat beaches that are about 2000 km apart. These interactions are closely related to the analytic, soliton solutions of a widely studied multidimensional nonlinear wave equation. On a much larger scale, tsunami waves can merge in similar ways…
