Great undersea waves may be solitons
DOI: 10.1063/1.2913820
Peculiar striations more than a hundred kilometers long, visible on satellite pictures of the surface of the Andaman and Sulu Seas in the Far East, appear to be of interest in fields as far removed from oceanogaphy as quantum field theory. A recent report of underwater current and temperature variations associated with such surface phenomena in the Andaman Sea, by Alfred Osborne, a physicist at Exxon Production Research (Houston), and Terrence Burch, an oceanographer with EG&G Environmental Consultants (Waltham, Mass.), suggests that these striations mark the propagation of “solitons,” exotic solutions of nonlinear wave equations that have captured the interest of mathematical physicists studying a broad range of phenomena spanning 22 orders of magnitude in size.
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