Seafloor moorings are used to track the internal waves with dozens of temperature, depth and conductivity sensors.
Julia Calderone
11 Swells Every Surfer Needs to Visit in a Lifetime
View Caption + #1: The World's Best Surf Spots
For beginners, there are plenty of great places to surf- all you need is some nice waves. But for the experienced, a steady supply of three foot waves isn't going to cut it- they need some major swells. These 11 spots, from Hawaii to Europe to Indonesia to South Africa, are among the best of the best, and should be on every surfer's "to ride before I die" list. Pasta Point Like the rest of the southern hemisphere, the Maldives are a great place for a northerner to spend a winter vacation on the waves. Pasta Point is best left to advanced riders; with "world class" waves and a reef coral just below the surface, things can get hairy. If you're interested, book a trip soon: as a warming climate causes sea level rise, more and more of the island nation is finding itself under water.
Robertson/SeaSurf via Getty Images
View Caption + #2: Jaws
Called Pe'ahi in Hawaiian, Jaws is ones of the biggest, baddest surf spots in the world: Waves can reach a staggering 120 feet. Before Laird Hamilton came up with tow-in surfing, the reef break couldn't be reached by surfers. Now the swell is well known but respected; note the surfer's life jacket in the photo. READ MORE: Hawaii's Top 13 Surfing Spots
Ron Dahlquist/Corbis
View Caption + #3: Cloudbreak
Cloudbreak isn't a wave you can just paddle up to and ride; it's only accessible to visitors to the Tavarua Surf Resort, on the eponymous island in Fiji. You still need to catch a boat ride out to the reef, about a mile offshore. The wave breaks down into three sections, according to the Big Wave Blog: the top, the middle, and "shish kabobs" -- the middle part that sends surfers over a sharp, shallow reef. READ MORE: Gorgeous Surf Video Will Make You Want to Move to Fiji
Pierre Tostee/Getty Images
View Caption + #4: Bundoran Beach
Ireland may conjure images of leprechauns and castles, but it has a few surf spots up its sleeve as well. North of the beach where 50 foot swells hit just in time for St Patrick's Day, Bundoran Beach in County Donegal proves that the Atlantic Ocean can produces waves on par with the Pacific's. Your vacation may not be the stuff of mai thais and white sand beaches, but if the waves are great, who cares? READ MORE: Gorgeous Images of Ireland That Will Make You Wish You Were There
Peter Zoeller/Design Pics/Corbis
View Caption + #5: Supertubes
West of Port Elizabeth on South Africa's south coast, Jeffreys Bay plays host to the Billabong Pro Series in July. If you want to be involved but aren't a world class professional surfer, you can enter the Supertubes One Shot contest: Take the best photo of the 2012 competition and you could win $2,000 and get your shot on the event poster.
Hamish Blair/Getty Images
View Caption + #6: Cloud Nine
As the name implies, this wave on Siargao Island in the Philippines will make any talented surfer a happy camper. Discovered in the 1980s, the tube is hollow and thick, and home to the occasional Billabong competition. Cloud Nine gets extra points for offering night surfing, lit with a 50 foot tower strung up with ten 1,000 watt flood lights.
Jake White via Getty Images
View Caption + #7: Teahupoo
If you know anything about world class surfing, you're familiar with Teahupoo (pronounced CHO-PO), the surf break in Tahiti that last summer produced waves that were too big to surf. Waves that can top two story buildings aren't a rare sight- but you can only really appreciate what it's like by getting in the tube yourself. READ MORE: Surfers Ignore a "Code Red" Alert to Catch Dangerous, Yet Epic Waves (Video)
View Caption + #8: Superbank
Running from Snapper Rocks, the rocky outcrop on Australia's Gold Coast in Queensland, for just over a mile, the Superbank is actually a manmade surf heaven. A 1995 landscaping project to make the nearby mouth of the Tweed River suitable ended up extending the beaches seaward, yielding a new sandbar and thus a new surf break. You have to be really lucky to catch a wave that runs for the full mile, but dreams can come true, right?
Pierre Tostee/Getty Images
View Caption + #9: Banzai
Simply known as "Pipe," the Banzai Pipeline on Oahu's North Shore is literally a killer wave; it claimed the life of Tahitian pro surfer Malik Joyeux in 2005, along with four others in the past eight years alone. But the dangerous reputation doesn't keep the best surfers from trying to catch some of the best tubes on the planet. Photo: surfglassy / Creative Commons
View Caption + #10: Hossegor
If Ireland is little known for its surf spots, France is even less so. The distinctly non-French sounding Hossegor sits on the southwest coast, where large sandy beaches stretch as far as the eye can see. The "hollow, consistent breaks" are among the world's best, and certainly the best in the land of baguettes. Photo: Gaël LE HIR / Creative Commons
View Caption + #11: Mentawai Islands
The Mentawai Islands, off the western coast off the main Indonesian island of Sumatra, are a fantastic tropical surfing destination. They were also in the path of destruction caused by a massive tsunami that killed hundreds in 2010. The 70 islands provide 100 miles of quality surfing beaches and 49 distinct, named surf breaks. Bet you can't ride them all! Follow Alex on Twitter. Photo: colmsurf / Creative Commons
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Oceanographer Rob Pinkel unpacked crates of scientific instruments this week aboard the 272-foot research vessel Falkor while docked in the port of Hobart, on the island of Tasmania. He checked the weather and made preparations along with several dozen other scientific crew members to hunt for an elusive ocean phenomenon, massive “internal waves” that are born on the tidal straits of New Zealand, chug across the Tasman Sea, and bounce off the coastline of Tasmania.
“We are expecting to see a large wave in the interior of the Tasman Sea crossing and hitting the slopes of Tasmania,” said Pinkel, a physical oceanographer from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We have some specialized instruments that can see what’s going on in a pretty fast time scale.”
We examine the dire state of perhaps the most interesting and diverse part of our planet.
DCI
Compared to fast-moving, wind-driven surface waves, internal waves are lumbering giants that can grow to more than 2,000 feet high and travel at 3 to six 6 miles per hour. They are found across the world’s oceans, including coastal California and the mid-Atlantic. These waves churn cold deep water with warm surface water like a gigantic washing machine. It takes a week for them to journey from New Zealand to Tasmania.
As they propagate, internal waves stir up sea bottom nutrients like nitrogen, a prime food source for tiny surface-dwelling plankton, small fish and the entire marine food chain above. Internal waves create havoc for submarines and oil rigs, drag ships across the surface like toy boats, and have reportedly killed unwary scuba divers by plunging them hundreds of feet deep in a matter of minutes.
To better understand how internal waves operate, about 60 researchers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and several other nations have converged on Hobart and the Tasman Sea between now and mid-March for the Tasman Tidal Dissipation Experiment (TTIDE).
Scripps physical oceanographer Matthew Alford says that internal waves are an important link between the Earth’s climate and ocean. Climate modelers need to understand the mixing process in order to build more accurate forecasts of how much heat the ocean can store, and consequently how fast the Earth’s atmospheric temperature will rise in the future.
“They are like waves on the beach but they are down deep,” said Matthew Alford, a physical oceanographer at Scripps who just completed a 23-day expedition to the Tasman Sea above the R/V Revelle, an oceanographic research ship based in San Diego. “Understanding internal waves is a hot topic for oceanographers right now.”
To capture the waves, the scientists have erected a fenceline of oceanographic instruments called moorings across the Tasman Sea. The moorings are anchored to the seafloor on the bottom and have a floating buoy on top. Robotic instruments crawl up and down the mooring measuring ocean salinity, depth and temperature to track the passage of the turbulent internal waves.
“It’s almost like a firehose or a nozzle of wave energy that is directed and pointed directly at Tasmania,” Alford said from Hobart. “We want to see the birth of the waves, watch them across the sea, and reach this final stage. We are trying to watch that process underwater.”
Other researchers, like Peter Strutton, associate professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, want to know what internal waves do to tiny marine plants (phytoplankton). He’s taking water samples from various depths to see how much nitrogen the plants consume as the waves pass.
“Our work will help determine the reasons for the high productivity in the Tasman Sea, which will in turn help us understand if productivity changes seasonally or on longer time scales,” Strutton said via e-mail from sea. “Ultimately we’d like to use this information to help predict how marine ecosystems may change in the future.”