waves

[nibot]

One of the things I was taught in elementary school that has long bothered me is that "in [ocean] waves, the water isn't moving, it's just the effect that's moving." Watching the surfers outside my window (ha!), I can't help but remember this. Of course the spirit of the statement is correct, but the problem is that water is not a particularly compressable fluid, so conservation of mass says that water has to be moving. eh?

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

good point. I really wasn't making the incompressible connection.