Deep ocean waves5/7/2023 ![]() Thus, Newton envisioned his law of gravitation as acting across all space. They assumed the laws of nature were universal and acted the same everywhere, whether on Earth or far beyond the Moon. The heavens were perfect, immutable and incorruptible, while the terrestrial realm was erratic, imperfect and changeable.Įarly scientists defied that demarcation. The medieval world saw the cosmos as divided into irreconcilable parts. The discovery throws new light on the ubiquity of Kelvin-Helmholtz billows in nature and, as a happy byproduct, the universality of natural law - a founding assumption of modern science. Their typical wavelength was 75 meters, or about 250 feet, and they moved very slowly, one passing about every 50 seconds. ![]() 6, in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, the scientists reported how a network of temperature sensors that they moored at a depth of a half kilometer, or a third of a mile, gave strong evidence of the passing waves. In a first, scientists from the Netherlands and France found the breaking waves rippling down the sides of an underwater mountain in the Atlantic some 700 miles south of the Azores. In their early stages, the waves produce the kind of slopes that surfers dream about. At the boundary, the interaction produces a sequence of crests that rise gently and then curl into chaotic turbulence. They originate when two fluids, or gases, (or sea and air), move past one another at different speeds. Scientists have long tracked these distinctive waves, finding them on the windblown sea, on sand dunes, among clouds and even in the churning gases of Saturn and Jupiter. The deep waves have the distinguishing curl of Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, a type of wave present throughout nature. ![]() The discovery also illustrates the radical nature of the insights that lay behind the start of the scientific revolution some four centuries ago. The finding reveals the presence of a subtle new force that can stir the dark seabed, and it helps to explain some of the nuances of planetary recycling and the provision of food to abyssal life. Scientists exploring the deep sea have discovered a distinctive kind of breaking wave.
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