Jim Thomson is principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington. He studies ocean surface waves and coastal processes.
Tuesday, Oct. 16
32.7153 degrees north latitude, 117.1564 degrees west longitude
We finished our last days at sea with more strong winds and another great set of buoy measurements. During the night, the ship made steady progress back to San Diego. Abruptly, after three weeks with a blank horizon, land was there in front of us. A few hours later, the ship was tied up at the pier and the frenzy of offloading was in full swing.
It went quickly, and by 10 the next morning, everything was back in our steel shipping container. Our flight home to Seattle wasn't until 6 p.m. We tried to get on earlier flights, each of us weary and ready to see family and friends. Every flight was full, and thus we had an afternoon to kill in San Diego. What to do?
Go surfing, of course.
I called some old friends at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. We met for lunch and talked shop over some sandwiches. After lunch, they went back to work and we borrowed some boards to surf at the foot of the research pier.
The breaking surf at a beach is a distant cousin to the breaking waves we have just been studying in the open ocean. Both types of waves break because they become too steep, but the reasons for the steepness differ. In the open ocean, waves become steep when the wind blows, and they break when too much energy accumulates in one spot.
In the surf zone, waves become steep because they run out of water, condensing all their energy into one spot, with a similarly turbulent result.
I am not a good surfer. I caught a few waves and stood up, but it wasn't pretty. It was humbling. That's fine with me.
There are two things that are central to my love for science. The first is the process of solving a puzzle. A new data set is a puzzle: To understand it, the pieces must placed again and again, until the whole of it begins to take shape.
The second is the humbling effect of this process, the acute realization that the natural world has more complexity than we will ever fully describe in our precious journals and books.
A breaking wave is an awesome thing to behold (especially if you are on the wrong side of it with a surfboard). To get close to it, to stare into the chaos of the cresting foam, is to grapple with the unknown. And once you catch that wave, you just want another.
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