The Sweet Science of Surfing
AFP/Getty Images. Professional surfer on Teahupoo wave in Tahiti.
Maryland is not among the surf capitals of the world. Crabs, yes. Waves, no.
Despite this, I am trying to learn to surf the murky waters and often waveless beaches of the Eastern Shore.
In the process I'm learning a lot about atmospheric and oceanographic patterns of the region. One of the first things you learn is that a lot of science goes into surfing. We are talking science in the most basic sense of the word: gathering clues from the physical world and using them, in conjunction with a conceptual model of the workings of nature, to predict the future. Surfers stare into the crystal ball looking for one thing: waves.
Maryland's lackluster surf stems from several factors.
One is its unfavorable bathymetry, the apt term used to describe the depth of the water over the seafloor.
The best surfing waves come from far out in the ocean, generated by distant storms. As they travel across the ocean, the waves organize themselves into wide, evenly spaces swells that march landward.
On the East Coast those deep ocean swells hit a wide continental shelf that juts far into the Atlantic. The shelf acts like a giant underwater speed bump, causing swells to lose energy in the form of friction created by the sea floor before they make land.
In contrast, California has a short continental shelf (see map below for a comparison) that allows waves to carry their power right to the shore.
Courtesy NOAA
While the continental shelf is wide along the entire East Coast, a few areas of land project out into the ocean and absorb more of the ocean's power. These include parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, North Carolina's Outer Banks and areas of Florida. Some of these areas absorb swells that might otherwise hit Maryland, Virginia or Delaware. Wave thieves, we Marylanders might call them.
