A certain phenomenon has confounded scientists for almost two centuries: lone waves, strangely tall and fast, moving independently of the ebb and flow around them.
More recently, an urgent reason to understand these waves became clear, when huge versions of them — monster tsunamis — killed more than a quarter of a million people in southern Asia in 2004 and close to 20,000 in Japan in 2011.
Georgios Vatistas, professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, has spent decades trying to decode these solitary waves and predict their movements. His newest findings, published this month in the journal Physical Review E, pushed the field forward by observing how the waves behave when they occur in a series.
Vatistas’s research suggests there’s much to learn from these “clusters” of solitary waves. They organize themselves in intriguing ways, moving in unexpected harmony.
The team in his lab recorded the waves arising spontaneously but simultaneously. They quickly arranged themselves symmetrically, all evenly spaced, travelling at the same speed.
Watching them, an observer would be reminded of a dance, Vatistas says.
“We know how the clusters behave. Now, as engineers, how do we use this to better human life?”