Surf's Up: Internal Waves
While wind waves travel on the surface of the ocean; internal waves form beneath the surface, between water layers of different density. They can be very large and much more complex than surface waves.
Surf's Up: Monitoring and Predicting Wave Processes
Wave monitoring and prediction is important not only for anticipating wave energy on the coast, but out at sea as well. With that in mind, oceanographers have devised a number of highly innovative techniques and devices.
Surf's Up: Rogue Waves
While the effects of wind wave energy are mostly felt along the shoreline, the impact of waves can also be felt out in the open ocean. In some cases, as with extraordinarily large "rogue" waves, these kinds of waves are ..
Surf's Up: Shoreline Effects of Wind Wave Energy
Nearly all of the effects of wind wave energy are felt along the shoreline, often in the form of erosion. The erosion process on the shoreline moves sand from one place to another and, over time, actually changes the ori..
Surf's Up: Wave Climate and the D-Day Story
Just as continental locations have a climate, so, too, do ocean waves. Knowing the wave climate at Normandy became a key part of the planning process in advance of the Allied D-Day invasion during World War II.
Survivors: Early Invertebrates
The first animals on Earth were invertebrates-animals without backbones-and they diversified rapidly in the geologic period known as the Cambrian.
Survivors: Intertidal Zonation
An organism's preference for the habitat to which it is adapted creates a mosaic of similarly adapted organisms clumped in recognizable bands along the shore. This is a phenomenon known as intertidal zonation.
Survivors: Long-Term Survivors
Despite the challenges of long-term survival on Earth, some phyla-including sponges, jellyfish, arthropods and mollusks-have endured for hundreds of millions of years, even in the most extreme environments.
Survivors: Predators and Prey
The ocean provides home to a dazzling variety of life. Yet there was a time when early life forms faced a multitude of struggles that threatened their ability to survive. The evolution of adaptations to overcome these ch..
Survivors: Survival in the Intertidal Zone
Perhaps nowhere on Earth is the ability to survive better demonstrated than that part of the shore alternately exposed and submerged by tides-a region known as the intertidal zone. Remarkably, marine organisms there have..