Tag Archives: foam stripe

Foam stripes and sand ripples

Leave a reply

So you might have seen my novel on the formation of sand ripples last week, and the tl;dr: I have a vague idea of how sand ripples form, but it’s not as clear to me as I would like.

But imagine my delight when, after two days of foam stripes like this one…

…there was a distinctly different ripple pattern directly underneath the foam stripe!!!

In some places, there was even a tiny little bit of foam left. Where? Right on top the anomalous stripe in the ripple pattern!!!

So now I still don’t understand what’s going on in the sand, but at least it’s lining up exactly with a phenomenon in the waves that I don’t understand, either! :-D

Surfactants 

Leave a reply

When I was talking about foam stripes the other day, you might have noticed that the foam stripe wasn’t a foam stripe all the way, but became “just a stripe”. And since I have been thinking about surfactants a lot recently, I think that’s actually what we are seeing in places where the stripe is just a stripe: Some kind of film on the water.

Inside “the stripe” the water looks a lot smoother and waves are dampened out.

At first I thought that it was maybe due to being sheltered from the wind, but clearly that wasn’t the case. If anything, the stripe was in a location where it was more windy (see where it comes out underneath the pier? That should be funneling wind around that corner, not sheltering from the wind!). But surfactants would make sense if they collected in the convergence zone of the stripe.

See how the reflections from the sun are different where there is stuff on the water and the waves are dampened out?