Spectrum #35; Waves Across the Pacific
- Series
- Spectrum #35
- Episode
- Waves Across the Pacific
- AAPB ID
- cpb-aacip/75-9995xh8c
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- Description
- Description
- Ocean waves sources of delight to the surfer, bane of the sailor where do they come from? Where do they go? How do they get there? Waves Across the Pacific takes the viewer along with Dr. Walter Munk and his colleagues at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla California on their quest for new knowledge about the oceans waves. The cameras follow these dedicated scientists through an entire summer spent tracing the course of waves from their birth in the turbulent waters of the Antarctic to their death ten thousand miles away on the gently sloping beaches of Alaska. Oceanographers have known for some time that Antarctic storms generate enormous waves which can be detected half-way around the globe. Dr. Munks task was to investigate the possibility of identifying a particular train of waves on its long journey and study the processes by which wave energy is lost. The scientists were particularly concerned with testing Dr. Munks hypothesis that wave energy would be scattered in the region of the equatorial trade winds preventing them from reaching the North Pacific. But before the expedition could set out instruments had to be developed. It was a difficult task. Equipment was needed which could measure waves a mile long and a tenth of a millimeter high waves completely beyond detection by the naked eye. This challenge was mastered and a device the wave sensor developed which, when placed on the bottom of the sea, would record waves passing above by transforming variations in water pressure into an electrical signal which was then amplified, transmitted, and recorded on tape. The next step was the selection of recording stations along a great circle route 10,000 miles in length, stretching across the entire Pacific. The camera takes us to the six sites Cape Palliser Light in New Zealand, a rugged storm-battered point where the arrival of the great waves from an Antarctic storm could be expected; Tatuila, one of the volcanic islands of Samoa, 2,100 miles to the Northeast; the uninhabited equatorial atoll of Palmyra, 1,600 miles beyond Samoa, only two miles wide with no point of land more than six feet above sea level; the easily accessible Kewalo basin in downtown Honolulu, selected for the central wave station and expedition headquarters; the islandless North Pacific where the U.S. Navys mobile island FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) was stationed at 45 degrees north and 150 degrees west; and the final recording site an Alaskan beach, the end of the line for the trains of waves. On July 6th the first group of Antarctic waves arrived at Cape Pallister and the highly sensitive instruments worked perfectly. By determining the wave period the interval of time from one crest to the next it was possible to predict the arrival time at the next recording site. The viewer follows the waves as they travel from station to station. FLIP was now keeping a lonely vigil at her station in the North Pacific first major assignment at sea. The wave sensor was bolter to her hull and would reach its proper depth when FLIP flipped. The cameras record the action as the vessel floods her ballast tanks and slowly tilts to her vertical operating position, all but 55 feet of her 335-foot hull sinks underwater. As she flips, the crew aboard shifts with her what were the walls are now the floors. This strange ship is designed to heave up and down at a natural period longer that the longest swell, moving only three inches in a 30-foot sea. Wave measurements taken aboard FLIP were comparable to and in some ways better than, those made on land. Finally the waves reach their Alaskan destination, and the energy which propelled them across half the planet is at last expended on the breakers. When the expedition finished, Dr. Munk and his associates returned to California with some ten million data points on tape documenting waves from 12 major storms. A person using a desk calculator would have taken 2,000 years to convert this mass of data into a meaningful picture of the expeditions results a high speed computer completed the analysis in a week. The data proved that the scientists had succeeded in plotting the wave climate across the entire ocean. On the basis of observations in Samoa surfing conditions in Hawaii could be predicted three days in advance. Ironically, an original conjecture of Dr. Munks on equatorial attenuation was proven wrong. There was no appreciable loss of wave energy across the Equator. The research team was a bit disappointed by the findings that wave attenuations varied considerable from storm to storm. But as Dr. Munk says, this should be no surprise, for in nature no two storms or no two waves are ever alike.
- Asset type
- Episode
- Media type
- other
- Credits
-
- AAPB Contributor Holdings
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- Citations
- Chicago: “Spectrum #35; Waves Across the Pacific,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed December 26, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-9995xh8c.
- MLA: “Spectrum #35; Waves Across the Pacific.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. December 26, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-9995xh8c>.
- APA: Spectrum #35; Waves Across the Pacific. Boston, MA: American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-9995xh8c