What Causes Waves?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Brian with ericksontutoring.blogspot.com. Today, we are going to discuss what causes waves. So the major cause of waves, especially ocean waves, is wind. There are other causes, tides cause some waves and earthquakes cause some waves as well, but the vast majority of waves that you see are caused by wind. So, let's look at how that happens. First, you start off with a theoretically calm body of water. You have a cloud and you have some wind coming down. The energy from this wind as the wind is passing over the water transfers due to friction and it starts to sort of bring the water up with it as the wind is going by. Once the wind sort of passes over or once it is no longer able to hold up the water, the water drops you start to get away from this up and down motion that we associate with waves. Waves are just the result of winds passing over water partially lifting it up and then dropping back down. There are a couple different factors that effect the size and strength of your waves and let's take a look at those as well. So the three main factors effecting waves and wave size are the wind strength so a stronger wind is going to make larger waves that's just because there is more energy to transfer over to the water at that friction point. Second the amount of surface area that the winds can pass over so maybe it is not the wind surface area as much as the surface area of the object so the water. With a larger area for wind to sort of transfer energy it is going to generate more waves and third wind duration so longer periods of wind are going to be able to transfer more energy to the water which also creates larger and more frequent waves. So this has been a discussion of what causes oceanic waves and waves in bodies of water. Thank you for joining me for the discussion."