Lectures on Physics has been derived from Benjamin Crowell's Light and Matter series of free introductory textbooks on physics. See the editorial for more information....

Ocean waves near and far from shore

Ocean waves are formed by winds, typically on the open sea, and the wavefronts are perpendicular to the direction of the wind that formed them. At the beach, however, you have undoubtedly observed that waves tend come in with their wavefronts very nearly (but not exactly) parallal to the shoreline. This is because the speed of water waves in shallow water depends on depth: the shallower the water, the slower the wave. Althoughthe change from the fast-wave region to the slow-wave region is gradual rather than abrupt, there is still refraction, and the wave motion is nearly perpendicular to the normal in the slow region.




Last Update: 2009-06-21