March winds came a bit early yesterday, with some gusts exceeding 50 miles per hour. Normally placid Great Cove was crawling with whitecaps, which made me realize that I didn’t know much about these waves.
It turns out that new studies of them are being devised to improve the accuracy of models for predicting climate changes, according to reports in Nature magazine.
Most whitecaps are caused by the wind blowing over the ocean surface fast enough to make waves that crest with droplets and bubbles that scatter the light into whiteness. It’s a mixture of air and sea water. Beneath each wave is a significant turbulence known as the “bubble plume.” That plume is being studied with new visualization methods because bubbles play a surprisingly important role – physical, chemical, and biological – in the air-sea interface.
As the bubbles rise, they scavenge bacteria and organic material and buoy it to the surface; at the surface, bubbles increase gas transfers between the sea and air, and they even are the sources and scatterers of underwater sound. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on December 3, 2021.)