Anyone familiar with standard wave mechanics will expect that crossing waves will pass right through each other. The part that confuses me is why the waves don't spread out laterally. For instance, take the waves in the article that went from the Indian ocean to the Mexican coast. Wouldn't they fan out across the entirety of the Pacific ocean after passing between Australia and Antarctica? Or maybe they do, but they're so big to begin with that even after they do so, they're still big enough to crash on the entire west coast of the Americas? Would the same storm have caused gigantic waves to crash on the much closer southern Australian shore?
Flying you can see when strong winds blow from land. The sea is flat at the beach. But just 3 or 5 miles inland waves can be 1 meter high or more. It's amazing how fast they go from milimeters to meters.<p>It's also possible to see how the wind blows differently, when guided by hills and valleys. Just like pointing a huge hair dryer to a bathtub.<p>Edit: typos
Who is doing the work tracking waves today? This reminds me of the butterfly flapping his wings of fractal fame. In this case though, they are tracking the whole path.
> "The astonishing thing is, you'd think it would bump into a million other waves that are coming at it from every direction; that it would pass through other storms, spreading, bumping, traveling, that all this travel would sap its momentum. But, as Walter Munk would discover, that's not what happens."<p>Kinda weird that the article spends so long explaining high-school physics, and in such astonished terms. Zomg! Waves pass through each other! The Superposition principle! If they think that's cool, they should see some of the stuff you can do with light and sound.