Is the sea calm beneath the surface during a storm?
I am rewatching The Little Mermaid and during the scene where prince Eric's ship is hit by a storm, you can see some shorter shots of the sea beneath its surface and it looks pretty calm, while the surface is absolutely ravaged by the storm.
Is this an oversimplification or is this actually the case?
14 replies
This may not be what you are looking for, there was a guy who took half of his family scuba diving the day of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.
He said the day before scuba diving was easy. The day of the Tsunami he described scuba diving as trying to swim inside of a washing machine. He knew something was really wrong long before the boat he was on got back to shore.
The depth of a wave is half its wavelength.
With waves 8 meters apart, the water is completely calm 4 meters down. Relative to the storm anyway
Veritasium short
Learning about how this formula causes waves to crest was such a lightbulb moment for me.
Insane how "the internet*" has got your back sometimes. I'm gonna talk about this formula nonstop at my workplace tomorrow.
Thanks! 😁
*the people
It's stupidly difficult to find an answer thanks to the enshittification of the internet. I did find this:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-deep-is-an-ocean-wave
Try Kagi, a paid search engine, it has improved a lot my experience on the internet. You can also set personal preferences to avoid sites, or mark results as slop so other users avoid them as well.
Gotta admit that Kagi has been a breath of fresh air. Worth the cost, and the ability to have your searches use anonymous tokens instead is a big plus as well.
How can you use anonymous tokens
Kagi Privacy Pass.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
So your browser generates tokens from your logged in session. Then when searching it uses a token instead of your session id for your Kagi searches. So your search on Kagi's end looks the same as every other privacy pass token search, not individually identifiable.
Privacy Pass does not work on the limited Starter plan. That plan is limited to 300 searches per month, so they have to be able to track your specific usage.
That's awesome! Thanks for the explanation!
There are consistent currents beneath the surface. They're definitely impacted by wind forces on the surface, but the currents would be the dominant force for sure. I'd imagine it would be comparatively peaceful once you get more than 100m down.
I'm thinking oceans can absorb a lot of energy from the surface before causing much movement. The comparative density and depth must be huge factors in that.
It's moreso when you get giant landslides, earthquakes or explosions when you get significant movement AFAIK.
It depends on how far below the surface and the storm. Energy naturally dissipates over distance.
I'd imagine it's somewhat oversimplified. Consider rip currents. They look calm on the surface but can be deadly and carry you a mile out to sea. It might not seem like it if you don't have a point of reference to track and cresting waves to get above.