Sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture to understand what is going on, especially when looking at phenomena on the water.

My dad recently sent me the images below from Schleswig: Weird foamy stripes on the water.

They don’t really make a lot of sense until you look at it from a different angle:

Now you see how the foam is forming in the waves all over, but that only some of that foam makes it through the gaps in that floating pier, forming a stripe behind every single gap. Cool, isn’t it?

What I found also really interesting in one of the pictures was this:

The different wave fields upwind and downwind from the pontoons. On the upwind side (right side of the picture above), you see really choppy water. On the downwind side, though, close to the pontoons, the water is pretty calm, and only with increasing distance from the pontoons waves start to build again. And we can see that the waves at the far left of that picture are still a lot smaller than those coming in on the right side, just right of the pontoons!