SciShow Tangents - Waves

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Whether you're surfing, listening to the radio, getting an x-ray, or just looking at something, take a moment and thank waves for making it all possible!Plus learn yet another shocking truth: all of reality is probably maybe waves! Uh oh!Head to the link below to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter! https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangentsA big thank you to Patreon subscriber Eclectic Bunny for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenSources:[Truth or Fail][Fact Off]Ruffed grouse sonic boomVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVfiIp3QGs4https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ruffed_Grouse/soundshttps://www.nps.gov/articles/netn-species-spotlight-ruffed-grouse.htmhttps://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/bird-sound-barrierhttps://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-016-DFRC.htmlMeta-mirrorhttps://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/meta-mirrorhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-03/du-rs030719.php[Ask the Science Couch]Underwater waveshttps://news.mit.edu/2013/the-oceans-hidden-waves-show-their-power-0108https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14399#affil-authhttps://research.cornell.edu/research/understanding-formation-underwater-waveshttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0025322791900445https://www.hydro-international.com/content/article/mysterious-underwater-waves[Butt One More Thing]Toilet waveshttps://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27377/why-does-toilet-water-move-when-its-windy-outside

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the Lightly Competitive Knowledge Showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, coming to you with a new quality of audio. I'm not saying it's worse or better. I'm just saying it's new because I sat down to record this podcast and my computer gave what Apple calls a prohibitory symbol. So I got a prohibitory symbol, which is not a great, not great. It's just not great. It's overall not great. You got the Ghostbusters logo on your computer and it not great it's just not great it's overall not great you got the ghostbusters logo on your computer and it means that it's fucked up yeah uh my my computer is very afraid of ghosts but i am joined by our resident science expert sari riley hello sari

should my should my computer be afraid of ghosts Well, maybe if a ghost possesses your computer, then it'll start working again. But do fun, quirky things to your files so you won't have to put all your creative input into it. The ghost will also help. So probably not. That sounds awesome. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm also joined by our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Sam, should my computer be afraid of ghosts?

Absolutely. Everybody should be afraid of ghosts absolutely everybody should be afraid of ghosts they're all around us at all times and they're watching waiting until they can pierce the veil and scare us uh what's a worse outcome really than oh hello computer ghost we welcome you to the podcast it's in the room oh no oh is that gonna happen through the whole how do i make that stop happening well you take a hammer oh god there isn't much that is just more just like stub your toe annoying than a computer that like your job is to work i I cannot do shit without you. And it's like, I think that I've, I think I'm done.

I've lived a whole eight months and that was long enough for me. And I'm going to need you to go through about 10 hours of solid work to try and fix me before you give up and get a new one. That's the worst part is how weirdly physical trying to fix your computer is. And you're just like crawling all around it, pushing buttons and holding different key

configurations. Yeah. Horrible. Oh boy. So every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic and being way too stressed out about the situation regarding the data

on our computer right now. Our panelists are playing for glory. They're also playing for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week, according to my show notes from Sari. I wave to you, you wave to me. The wave goes through a crowd.

We talk about the wavy sea or waves of grain and fields plowed. Waves propagate to and fro in brains and ponds and air, but to add some flair, let's go where electromagnetism is. It's pretty cool there. Imagine a guy surfing on light, their arms are out as if in

flight. The peak to trough gives us amplitude, how bumpy the journey is for this dude. More extreme highs and lows are what makes colors brighter. They tend to strut. While wavelength goes from peak to peak and helps determine frequency. If the waves go faster, the hertz are up,

but they can be long and gentle like a warm-up. And that's where all this stuff gets weird, because infrareds are longer and gamma rays are feared. Well, roses are red and physics is mathy. That's all I got. I'm not going down that pathy. Really, really good.

Yeah, I mean, that is how I feel about waves, where it's like, okay, a wave. I've seen those and then I can sort of like kind of get a sound wave and then it's like also there are space waves in space and i'm like shut up go away i'm done yeah yeah or like thinking that a radio wave like the wavelength is as long as a building i'm like what does that even mean what i can't see it i can't really imagine it and what how are you picking that up

how is my radio picking up a building wave yeah and also people now these days are always like well what you have to understand is particles are just excitations like waves in fields just field excitations i'm like no i'm not just excitations in a field and if i am i don't i don't want to know about it are you saying everything is waves yeah everything's kind of wave everything's kind of particles and everything's kind of waves that's the wave particle duality and that's all we're going to say about that is that a real thing the wave particle particle duality? Yeah. A lot of people asked about that for the science couch. But as I wrote in my email, Hank and I are not great physicists, so we cannot tackle that. We need a Henry if we're going to shed some light on that.

Yeah. I once wrote a song about quarks and I performed it on stage at VidCon and I came backstage and Henry was like, love that song. Can I go over the ways in which it is incorrect? Henry, if you don't know, is the guy from MinutePhysics, Henry Reich. And what a lovely man he is. So the topic for the day is waves. Sari

has given us a poem about waves and now it's time for Sari to tell us what a he is. So the topic for the day is waves. Sari has given us a poem about waves and now it's time for Sari to tell us what a wave is. So I think a wave like a hole. This is another one. Whoa! Excuse me. In the way that the whole

episode was like, you know a hole when you see it. You know a wave when you see it. It's like, it's hole when you see it you know a wave when you see it it's like it's wavy but if you want to describe it with scientific terms then it is this is the phrase that i found a propagating dynamic disturbance of one or more quantities so it's a disturbance from an equilibrium that fluctuates and changes. And it can either be something that moves, like how an ocean wave moves, or it can be a standing wave, which is like plucking a guitar string that stays in place. And what does the propagating part of that mean? It means that the wave waves.

It goes? I'm making a hand motion. That's kind of what I thought. The propagating means that the like, the wave waves. It goes? Like, I'm making a hand motion. That's kind of what I thought. The propagating means that the wave moves somewhere. So, like, in the way that sound waves travel through air, or radiation travels, or you can see ocean waves move. Thank you, Hank's computer ghost. Do you have anything else to add? The computer ghost just wanted to say boom oh lord uh it's time to find out the etymology of the word wave i thought it was gonna be another

one of the like we looked at a thing and it was like oh wave but it seems like multiple words converged into into wave so there's wave the noun uh which came from water how old high german wag old frisian wag old norse vager which means water in motion or wave and so like the noun of a wave we were like ah there is a wave right but the verb wave came from moving back and forth or to weave so like in the way that you wave your hand you're like weaving your hand in the air and so you're moving your hand to and fro and then they i guess they looked at the ocean and were like huh that kind of moves to and fro as well so let's uh let's they were thinning out the english language a little bit they were pruning. Well, weird.

That's like that's pretty cool. I like that. And now that and now that we know all of that, thank you, Sari, for doing a lot of the heavy lifting for this episode. That means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show this week. It's time to play truth or fail. The most famous supersonic commercial airplane was the Concorde. And that Concorde and all supersonic things go faster than the speed that waves travel through air on our planet. And the Concorde began flying in the 1970s, and it reached speeds of up to 1,350 miles per hour.

And it was retired in 2003. Now, there are some people who are trying to make supersonic aircraft happen again, but as a supersonic aircraft approaches the speed of sound, it creates abrupt changes in the air around it, which creates shockwaves that are audible as sonic booms. And supersonic commercial flights like the Concorde operated for a long time, but they mostly flew over the ocean, and they didn't really take off in the Uorde operated for a long time, but they mostly flew over the ocean. And they didn't really take off in the U.S. from, like, you know, find a New Yorker to Los Angeles or something. But it's not for lack of trying. In the 1960s, the FAA ran an experiment on the effects of hypersonic flight that ultimately doomed supersonic commercial flight in the U.S., at least for now.

The following are descriptions of three experiments. One of them is real. Number one, the FAA had several supersonic flights take off every day for six months over Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to test the local residents' willingness to put up with regular sonic booms. And when residents complained about the stress of the noise and damage to their homes, public opinion began to shift against supersonic flights. Or experiment number two, to study the effect of hypersonic

flight on the weather, the FAA flew a commercial prototype as many times as they could in a day before the shockwaves began to affect local cloud formations in Seattle, Washington, with a maximum of three flights per day when you could fly. So there were some days when they decided they couldn't fly. And the aircraft was deemed economically unviable for widespread commercial use. Or, experiment number three, during the fall, the FAA set up flights in Trenton, New Jersey, to assess the effect of sonic booms on local geese population as they migrated south for the winter. While ornithologists reported that no geese were struck and killed by the planes,

the birds did, however, have difficulty navigating, which they attributed, the scientists, not the birds, to sonic booms interfering with signals that the birds needed to navigate. So was it, we tested the people of Oklahoma City to see if they could handle the sonic booms, or two, we tested the people of Seattle to see how if they could handle the sonic booms. Or two, we tested the people of Seattle to see how they felt about the extra clouds that were created. Or three, we tested the geese of Trenton, New Jersey to see how they were affected

by the sonic booms. It made more clouds? It made more clouds, yes. Which, in Seattle, you wouldn't think possible, but like when you only got like ten sunny days a year. It clears up. That's the great myth of Seattle is that it's gloomy all the time. That's what they tell people to stay away.

I lived there as well. And it's gloomy all the time. It rains so much. I know everybody's like, you can't have an umbrella. What are you? Oh, yeah. You can't carry an umbrella. You're a wimp if you carry an umbrella.

You are not. Why? It rains all the time. I know you wear a raincoat. People umbrella. You are not. Why? It rains all the time here. I know you wear a raincoat. That's it. People in New York carry umbrellas. It rains a lot there, too. Get over yourself, Sienna.

Okay, well, I don't think, I don't know. The goose one, on the one hand, I feel like nobody would give a shit about a bunch of geese. People give so much shits about geese. Yeah. We have laws in the U.S. that are like, you can't. Right. That's what I was going to say. I feel like enough people would go in front of Congress and be like, these geese are in trouble.

That Congress would be like, oh, fine. I think sometimes scientists think more about geese and wildlife than people. Depends on what the study is. The geese seems more likely than asking the residents of Oklahoma City to me. You think so? Yeah. I just can't imagine them being, like, I think they would just let them have it.

I guess so, yeah. Like, to ground something that could be commercially viable and make people a lot of money seems like... That is a good, you know, if there's a lot of money involved, eventually the geese become less important, it's true. Yeah, but people are also unimportant in that metric so i don't yeah and this is this has always led me astray but i'm gonna stick with my guns i've never heard of the seattle thing and i feel like my dad or one of my grandparents would have freaking complained

about it to me be like did you know there were these sonic booms causing extra rain that seems like it would come up as like on Jeopardy or as a Snapple fact or something you know

yeah like in the way that I know I was gonna say that I know things about Macklemore the only thing

I know about Macklemore is that he comes from Seattle okay then I was like I know Seattle things

but right well I think I'm gonna go with the goose thing. I do think enough people could raise a stink about geese. Okay. I was going to go with the goose. I'm going to go with the goose thing too. We have a goose and we have a goose and I don't know what happened, but it seems like

you forgot the actual answer existed at all, which is the people of Oklahoma City. Oh. So we've got a bunch of losers in the room, except for me. But yeah, so it turns out that people are very resistant to the idea of having lots of explosions all day long. Sure. Yeah. But also, they had to live through up to eight sonic booms every day. And also, my favorite part of this is that the experiment was called Operation Bongo 2.

It's possible, because it is a Roman numeral 2, that it was actually called Operation Bongo the 2nd. I think it's probably Operation Bongo 2, but I'd prefer it be called Operation Bongo the Second. I think it's probably Operation Bongo, too, but I'd prefer it be called Operation Bongo the Second. Now, the reason they did this is because there was an Air Force base nearby and and like 25 percent of the jobs in Oklahoma City at that time were in aircraft manufacturing. So like it's the it's the place in America where people are most likely to be in favor of new kinds of airplanes. But within the first week, there were 655 complaints. By the end of the experiment, there were 15,000 formal complaints sent to the Air Force and the FAA. And they included broken china, broken mirrors for which people were reimbursed. And while people did complain, 75% of the people responding to a survey

about their experiments said that they could learn to live with eight sonic booms per day. Oh, come on. But there was a guy who was quoted in the New York Times about the tests and said, maybe you could get from here

to New York in an hour, but I don't want to live that fast. Oh, cool guy. Yeah. Do they still fly the Concorde at all no no the Concorde has been totally retired that's what I thought ultimately it turns out it'll stop eventually I promise

ultimately it turns out that it's better to just like if you have a bunch of money it's better to like sit around and get taken care of for eight hours than it is to get to London really fast. That makes sense, I guess. Yeah. Can I ask a question that might be too complicated to answer? Wow. Why does a sonic boom?

Why is it happened? I'll try the basics. The basics is that the jet is making a noise, but the jet is pushing through the wave front of the noise. So all of the noise as a plane is traveling faster and faster, that sort of Doppler effect is making it so that all of the noise that's coming from the engines and going forward is getting compressed into a more and more compressed area because it's like the noise is happening and these are actual physical waves in the air so the noise is happening but they're getting pushed into a smaller and smaller physical space and then eventually when you break the speed of sound that wave front of really compressed sound waves like breaks apart and get like there's just a lot of, a lot of turbulence that occurs because of that. And that is just that,

that becomes a very loud noise. So there were some grains of truth here. The geese, not a thing, but they're in 1997, there was some thought that there was this like homing pigeon race and they had the pigeons had to go over some of the same area that the concord was going over and it seemed like they lost a lot more pigeons that year oh it's like didn't arrive

they didn't die they just like got confused and didn't go to the right place and the ones that did arrive arrived more slowly than usual so that but that to me is like there's not a lot of strong data on that one yeah and then as far as cloudiness, that was just made up. There is a very special cloud that can form in the very low-pressure areas when there is a sonic boom happening, when there's hypersonic travel happening. Because as the air creates this vacuum, it condenses a bunch of water. Wow. All right, so that means we're going into the break with Zero Zero Tie.

After the break, it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the Fact Off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented all their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. To decide who goes first, I have a trivia question for you. any way I see fit. To decide who goes first,

I have a trivia question for you. Tsunamis are a series of waves generated by the displacement of a lot of water, usually by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. And the Circumpacific Belt, also known as the Ring of Fire, is a loop around the Pacific Ocean

famous for earthquakes and active volcanoes. What percentage of tsunamis occur within the Pacific's ring of fire? I mean, I'm just going to say 100%. Oh. It seems like tsunamis only happen in one very, like a very specific part of the world.

100% is unusual in nature. You don't tend to get 100%. Well, 100% of clouds are in the sky, Hank. So, you know. Well, fog is a cloud. Fog. Oh, no. Fog, bro.

Oh, no. There's probably clouds underground somewhere too, huh? Yeah, underground clouds also. Hey, there are some stadiums that have clouds in them because they're so big. Is that the sky? It's not the sky if it's in a stadium. Well, is the sky anything that's not the ground? Yeah.

Is the sky anything that is not the ground? Do I have sky in my mouth? Uh-huh. That's like the next you have stardust within you. You have sky in your mouth. Eat the sky, bitches! Just wake up every morning and just eat the sky, bitches! Just wake up every

morning and just eat the sky. Take a bite out of the sky. Well, Sari, you can go ahead and say 99% and win. Oh, I want it to be a... I want you to do math. I'm gonna say 75%. Well, Sari,

not only wins, but was exactly correct. I mean, not exactly, but like to two significant figures, you were exactly correct. 75.000. How does anyone live without understanding significant figures? It sounds very hard to me. Sam? What is it?

I just wanted to know, how do you get by how do you get by without seems like i'm doing fine but there could be something i'm missing that i didn't know about till just now you just you live a little less precisely a little bit more like that guy in oklahoma who doesn't want to be fast oh sorry it was about 80 sorry i where do i get 75 from oh it's it is estimated that the ring of fire is home to 75 of the world's active volcanoes oh and it's responsible for about 90 of the world's earthquakes 80 of the tsunami no sorry sarah i'm sorry that i gave you it's too complicated to edit any of that out. So it's just staying in. Definitely leave it in,

especially because we got to talk about precision. Because everybody loves significant figures. And be mean to me. So two things you guys like to do. And the audience loves it too. Sari, who do you want to go first? Well, I'll go first and pull off the bandaid the roughed grouse is a

sorry thank you computer ghost the roughed grouse is a chunky one-ish pound ground dwelling bird that has evolved to camouflage with bark and fallen leaves it's also called a partridge and is a common bird targeted by hunters. And unlike birds that use complicated songs to communicate with each other, ruffed grouse are pretty vocally silent. They have a couple quiet alarm type calls when there's danger afoot or to get the attention of babies. And like I said, they're camouflaged to be grayish brownish and don't have flashy colors to woo each other either, so their mating routines involve some very weird sound waves. When males are trying to attract a mate, they make a loud noise with their wings, like lawnmower motor struggling to start loud. They hop on a log that becomes a sort of

home base for the rest of their life, so big decision there, and then rotate and flap their wings so fast, like 50 times in 8 to 10-ish seconds, that they create little sonic booms, basically pushing the air molecules aside so fast in the way that a plane would, faster than the speed of sound, that they form small shock waves. These little sonic booms echo out for a quarter of a mile or more, so not quite as explosive as the thunderclap of an aircraft, but it can still be quite confusing in the middle of the woods. These intense wing flaps take a ton of energy to do, but it's worth it because of passing on their genes. And while these low sounds are clear mating signals to other grouse and easily hearable by humans, it's thought that they're either too low frequency or difficult to pinpoint to attract their non-human predators like owls. So even though these waves are super loud with a high amplitude,

the frequency, the low wavelength of the roughed grouse sounds could keep them safe. And I have a sound to share with you so that you can listen to it. Yes, we have a clip, and it was recorded by Nathaniel H. Taylor and comes to us courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. He's just going absolutely ham. That nice that's kind of relaxing this is a question i thought up about crickets the other day crickets would be making sound and then you'd be like ah i like to eat crickets i'm going to go to where the cricket sound is and eat it is it the same

deal where they're just making a sound that you can't that like things that would eat them can't really find that is my guess i know that it's very hard to find a cricket it tends to be that that noise is difficult to locate in my experience but oh i am a human not a uh snake or lizard or bird yeah allpestprose.com says most predators are active during daylight hours which is why crickets chirp at night. And then if they feel slight vibrations in the air, then they go quiet. So maybe the predators can't hear the chirps, but they're just like, oh, gotta be quiet now. All right.

Sam, what do you got for us? Great bird, Sari, by the way. So now I'm going to try to talk about how reflections work and we'll see if i understood correctly you got how they worked so in waves i maybe any kind of wave i don't know sound wave and light wave is what i'm talking about bounce off the surface they bounce at the angle that they hit the surface so when you look in a mirror you see your own face because the light waves are bouncing off your face into the mirror then back into your eyes is that how a mirror works yeah then when you look in a mirror at an angle you see stuff way over there

because it's hitting it at an angle and then bouncing into your eyes cool so sound and light both do the same thing basically if you are able though to break the laws of reflection and make waves bounce off at like specific angles instead of the angle they hit an object you could divert sound and light in all kinds of crazy ways and do stuff like maybe make things perfectly silent or perfectly invisible and because perfect invisibility and perfect silence are both very cool and very useful mostly maybe for like the military but hopefully for other reasons too there are lots of researchers working on how to make that happen. So there's one way I read about

that was kind of wild sounding. Researchers set up a maze for sound waves and they shot a sound wave through it. And inside the maze, there were tons of tiny speakers that would shoot other sound out and literally smack into the sound wave and make it like go through this maze

and it would redirect the sound wave. And it would go through this maze and it would redirect the sound wave and it'll come out the other side having lost none of its energy somehow and yet sounded the same as going in but this tiny speaker method would require basically lots of tiny speakers to be everywhere on everything that you wanted to soundproof and that gets impractical really fast so researchers at duke university came up with a different solution that they called the Metamirror. And this ain't your father's mirror. So instead of preventing waves from hitting it like the tiny speaker method, the Metamirror has sound hit its surface, but its surface is covered in extremely tiny, intricate grooves that are etched in a way that mimic the shape of the sound wave. that are etched in a way that mimic the shape of the sound wave.

So the grooves are precisely designed to change the direction of the reflection of the sound wave and not absorb any of its energy. So I think they're like little slides or like ramps that the sound waves hit, and they physically are curved to maintain the curvature of the sound wave. So the effect of this is that sound waves can be directed in any direction the researchers choose without changing the amplitude or frequency or anything like that of the sound. So right now they're all 3D printed pieces of plastic.

So you can pretty much only shoot them with one specific sound and have them go one specific direction. But they're working on adaptive surfaces. So that anything, it would hit it and it would automatically know to like change shape to match that sound and bounce it any direction that you wanted it to go. And as far as applications go,

you could use metamirrors for like noise cancellation and soundproofing, which they're especially good at because they can be made to absorb certain sounds and bounce others out. So you can make like really good speakers that wouldn't have any kind of like crackle or anything like that. It would just bounce out all the good sounds

and none of the bad sounds. And redirecting sound waves is cool, but this team is also looking into redirecting light waves with metamirrors. So they can't really do it yet because they're just 3D printing stuff and they have to be so, so small, I guess, because light waves are way smaller.

Or like they're tighter. So the grooves have to be way smaller. that or like they're tighter yeah so the grooves have to be way smaller but if they could come up with an adaptive light reflecting surface that could redirect light anywhere they wanted to they could potentially make like a perfect cloaking device where you look at something and it would just be completely invisible like with mirrors specifically i can imagine that being just the weirdest thing to look at uh-huh with sounds i'd be like i could imagine it being useful, but with a mirror, I'm just like,

wow, if that is actually a thing that would be possible, I can imagine just going insane looking at that thing. I think one of the things they were talking about was they could make a mirror that you'd look in and you wouldn't be able to see yourself, but you could see everything else around you, which would be horrifying. Yeah, not particularly useful, but you could see everything else around you, which would be horrifying. Yeah.

Not particularly useful, but certainly all of these things are useful for hiding things that the military doesn't want you to see. Really looking forward to the future where I can be literally not trust my senses at all. Yeah. Well, maybe it'd be funny at like Disney World too. With Disney World and the military.

Yeah. Pretend to be a vampire and then also there could be a person around you at any time and you wouldn't know. So we have the rough grouse creating tiny sonic booms as part of their mating routine, which I can barely believe. Or the metamirror, which breaks the rules of reflection and could be used to make things invisible or insoundable inaudible I guess is the word for that no I like yours better

I'm gonna go since you guys are tied I'm gonna call it for Sari because I think it is so strange that this grouse which does does not, let's admit, look particularly impressive. Not really. And break the speed of sound just for foreplay reasons. Hell yeah.

That's great. I'm behind this decision 100%. Every time you hear a partridge in a pear tree just imagine him just flapping you know waves is one of those topics that's hard as hell for dumb guys like me so

I should pick better you did the smartest guy fact of the pod I know but sometimes that's a problem I need to stick with animals look it needs to be related to a mating ritual

or else that's my rule that too yeah alright it's time to ask the science couch where we've got listener questions Look, it needs to be related to a mating ritual or else. That's my rule. That too, yeah. All right. It's time to ask the science couch where we've got listener questions for our virtual couch of finely honed scientific minds. This one's from at Hannah G at 0913. How do underwater waves work and how did we discover them? Underwater waves.

So are we talking about underwater sound waves? I assume. No, not underwater sound waves. So are we talking about underwater sound waves? I assume. No, not underwater sound waves. Like underwater waves that basically look like the waves on the surface. Oh, tell me more, Sari, because I know nothing about this. Yeah, we didn't discover them. Me and Hank didn't. Well, I discovered, Sari Riley discovered them

because Hannah G0913 asked about them. But actually, they are very hard to monitor because we don't do a bunch of intense underwater measuring because we don't do a lot of construction underwater very often or travel underwater. And so we know a lot more, and we do a lot more measuring of the atmosphere than we do the deep ocean.

And so underwater waves were actually theoretical and calculated. People assumed that because there are different current movements under the water, then there may be waves down there. And then they did a bunch of math and were like, yeah, there are probably waves down there. And then starting around the last decade or so, it seems like people are actually measuring them and finding regions of the ocean to measure them in. Such as in the Luzon Strait, a body of water that stretches about 200 miles between Taiwan and the Philippines, where some of the most powerful underwater waves are generated.

These waves are called underwater waves or internal waves or internal gravity waves or abyssal waves in various studies. And to my understanding, there were no pictures of them, which makes sense because no one's got like a camera down under the water. If you imagine an ocean wave on the surface, like it comes up and comes down and the water is interacting with the air in the way that the water and air are the two different mediums there you have to imagine that there is like a saltier chunk of water and a less salty chunk of water or a low temperature chunk of water and a high temperature chunk of water and for for the purpose of your mental image, one can be blue, one can be red. And the blue one is waving, like creating waves through the red one

in like the wave motion, which is different than just like a current flowing in any direction because it like adheres to the properties of a wave as it would exist on the surface of a pond or an ocean. And so it's because of these harsh boundaries between colder and less cold water and saltier and less salty water

that that can be detected instrumentally. And these underwater waves are generated by the same things as surface waves, just that propagate downward like tides. So gravity pulling on various bodies of water from the moon, and then winds blow the surface and that propagates downward. And these waves, in addition to other currents that are through the ocean, help with the circulation of sediments and pollution and nutrients throughout the ocean. And it's also, they're a really important piece in climate modeling.

And that's why a lot of people are studying them right now, because we know the ocean ends up capturing a lot of the carbon in the atmosphere, but also just a lot of the heat, like the ocean is a heat sink, and it moves the temperature around, moves the heat around. The group of scientists that are interested in hydroengineering or like the movements of the ocean are saying that our global climate models are inaccurate because we haven't entirely captured the the underwater waves and like the effect that these really huge like they

they reach heights of 170 meters and can travel at a leisurely pace of a few centimeters per second. So there's these like gentle giants propagating throughout the oceans that are moving things around that we don't necessarily always take into account if we assume that the ocean is either static or just moving along the currents that we already know of. It's a whole new bunch of complications to the ocean. It was already hard enough. Yeah. We continue to find things that we do not know which is great because before we knew about them then we definitely couldn't model them yeah but now that we do we're like dang it yeah

come on it'd be better it'd be better if you just hadn't showed up thank you very much we need to start being able to talk to whales or something they They can be like, just tell us what's going on down there, whales. Yeah, I'm sure they know. And they can give us the input or what we need to know. Our whale colleague, Dr. Orville. Dr. Whale. Dr. Whale, I'm sorry. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter

at SciShowTangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Euphonia53, at XBreeAsh, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, even though it didn't maybe sound like it usually does, it's really easy to do that. First, you can go to patreon.com slash scishowtangents

to become a patron and get access to things like our free newsletter and also bonus episodes. What did we decide the new podcast was called? Pee-pee-poo-poo-pedia. Yeah, poopy pee-pee-pedia. Great. Thank you. I'm so glad that you remembered that. I can never forget it. And I'm sure you're very disappointed that you did.

Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show. It also helps other people know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes. Our social media organizer is Paolo Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you!

And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But, one more thing. Many home plumbing systems feature a vent stack. I know mine does. A pipe that connects to the outside to allow gas from our waste, aka the bad poop smells, to vent outside instead of in our homes. However, this means that on a windy day outside, the air speeds up, which in turn lowers the air pressure in the pipe and pulls on the water in

the toilet. So if you want to take a little beach vacation and see some waves, you can just open up your toilet on a windy day and you can maybe possibly see some waves in your very own toilet. That's good because it also answers a question that people often have. Why on earth is my toilet moving? Not a toilet ghost. That's good because it also answers a question that people often have. Why on earth is my toilet moving?

Not a toilet ghost. That's super weird. Do people ask that? I've never noticed. I don't really sit and look at my toilet all that often and consider it.