It is often said that humans are the most intelligent beings on planet earth and because of these outstanding abilities we should be able to control everything. At some point with the technology development we indeed can control a lot of things, but we will NEVER be able to control the Nature. That’s simply impossible. Regardless how advanced the technology is, we are NOT and we will NEVER able to control what Nature can do. Unfortunately many people still don’t get this and the consequences turn out to end up in a very dramatic way. In this post I want to talk about a substance that allows life to exist on Earth. Let me share this with you and let’s understand it together, we can only work with it, we can NEVER fight against it. This is the WATER.
What is WATER?
Water, is a substance composed of 2 chemical elements, it is made of molecules containing 2 atoms of Hydrogen (H2) and 1 of Oxygen(O) (H2O) , existing in gaseous, liquid, and solid states. It is one of the most plentiful and essential of all compounds available on Earth. At room temperature is a tasteless, transparent and odourless liquid, and it has the important ability to dissolve many other substances.
Indeed, the versatility of water as a solvent is essential to living organisms. Life is believed to have originated in the aqueous solutions of the world’s oceans, and living organisms depend on aqueous solutions, such as blood and digestive juices, for biological processes. Water also exists on other planets and moons both within and beyond the solar system. (On Mars, On the Moon, in the atmosphere of Saturn, Neptun, Jupiter even in detectable amounts around the sun and on other extrasolar planet atmospheres).
Water covers 71% of the Earth’s surface, mostly in seas and oceans, but small portions of water also occur as groundwater something of 1.7%, in the glaciers and the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica (1.7%), even in the air as vapor, clouds (consisting of ice and liquid water suspended in air), and precipitation (0.001%), The Water moves continually through the water cycle of condensation, evaporation, precipitation, transpiration and runoff usually reaching the sea. In small quantities water appears colorless, but water actually has an intrinsic blue color caused by slight absorption of light at red wavelengths.
One thing is must be very obvious, the water in your plastic bottle is very different from the water in the ocean. The differences are not just in composition – their respective salt contents and so on – but also in behavior. The Earth’s oceans are in a constant state of flux:
- they both create winds and are driven by them;
- they create the clouds and our weather systems, and are driven by them;
- they heat up the atmosphere, but also store heat.
Huge global currents are established inside the oceans, and these affect our climate. Thus,despite being made of roughly the same molecules, the oceans and seas that cover 71% of our planet are not just giant versions of the water in a bottle. They are utterly different beasts. And beast is probably the right word to describe them.
Size matters when it comes to bodies of water. When wind blows over a small pond, this creates friction, which slows the wind down and pushes against the water. This causes a depression in the water’s surface. The surface tension of the water resists this change much as a rubber band resists being extended. Once that puff of wind ceases, just as with a rubber band, the release of tension, along with the force of gravity, restores the surface to its original form. As that water descends, a ripple is generated that radiates outwards, as each water molecule displaces another, which, in turn, displaces still another, and so on. A ripple in water is really a pulse of energy. Energy, having originated from the wind, is now stuck on the surface of the pond. It makes the surface of the pond rougher, and so increases the resistance to the wind flowing over its surface. Thus the ripple is joined by others and they’re pushed higher and higher. The higher the ripples, the greater the restoring force pulling them back down again, and so the rougher the pond becomes. There is a limit, though, to how high these ripples can go; eventually they’ll hit the edge of the pond, and most of their energy will be absorbed by the land. But the Ionger they travel, the higher they’ll get, which is why in a small pond ripples are never very big, but in a lake they can become so big that the wind will turn them into waves.
The top of a wave is called its peak (or crest) and the bottom is called the trough. The distance between them is what we refer to when we talk about the size of a wave. As long as the size of wave is smaller than the depth of the lake it’s in, then the wave will travel uninhibitedly. But as the wave approaches the shallower waters at the shore, the trough will start to interact with the bottom of the lake, causing a kind of friction that will slow the wave down and force it to break, leaving it lapping on the beach.
Even if you’re not a wave connoisseur, it’s still worth knowing about shoaling, because it could save your life. On the morning of 26 December 2004, tourists on the island of Phuket in Thailand were walking on the beach when they noticed something odd. The sea was receding fast, exposing usually submerged rocks and leaving boats in the bay stranded. This was the shoaling of a wave, only this wave was enormous: a tsunami.
In an ocean thousands of kilometres wide, those initial ripples have the time and space to grow to several metres height. Wind blowing over the surface of the ocean for 2 hours at 20 km/h can make waves 30 centimetres high. A 50 km/h wind blowing for a whole day can make waves 4 metres high. And a storm wind blowing for 3 or 4 days at 75 km/h can make 8-metre-high waves. The largest wave of this sort was recorded during a typhoon off the seas of Taiwan in 2007 as 32 metres high.
The waves produced during storms don’t stop when the storm abates. Like ripples in a pond, they travel across the ocean, which is when their length becomes important. The length of a wave is the distance from its peak to the peak of the next wave. In a stormy ocean, it’s hard to determine length because the waves are jumbled on top of each other; a rough, stormy sea looks like a moving morass of angry water. When the storm ends, though, the waves carry on their way, and cause they all have different wavelengths, they also have different speeds. So, as the waves travel across hundreds of kilometres of ocean; they separate out into sets, based on which ones are moving at similar speeds. Within the sets, the waves align so that they run parallel. Eventually, each set will arrive at the coast in an ordered and regular pattern. Thus the crash of waves on to the beach is essentially the sound of a storm that’s come from very faraway. That beautiful, hypnotic rhythm is all thanks to the complexities of ocean dynamics.
Given that storm waves are generated all over the ocean, it is a bit surprising that they usually approach land perpendicular to the beach. Surely, you might think, they should approach land at an angle determined by the straight line between the beach and whichever place in the ocean the waves were generated. But, no, waves are too tricky for that. As a wave travels across deep water, its speed remains constant, because there’s almost nothing that can slow it down. But as it approaches land, the water gets shallower, and the trough starts to interact with the seabed, slowing that part of the wave down. Meanwhile the parts of the wave that have not yet encountered shallow water carry on at the same speed. The difference in speeds turns the wave in the same way that braking on one wheel of a car changes its direction. The net result is that, as waves approach land, they turn so that they are parallel to the contours of the seabed, which tend to run perpendicular to the beach, and thus most waves approach the shore from the same direction.
Surfers all know this. They also know about shoaling, which is what makes surfing such an exciting sport. Imagine you’re sitting on your surfboard looking out to sea; what you really want to know is where and when the waves are going to break. As the waves come into shore, they slow down because they encounter shallow water, but that also increases their height. This is shoaling. The shallower the water gets, the higher the wave gets, until the steepness of the wave reaches a critical angle where it becomes unstable. It’s become so steep that you can slide down it on a surfboard, as if you were skiing down a mountain slope. Surfing requires balance, timing and an understanding of how waves behave. If you want to surf along a wave, you need part of the wave to start breaking before the rest. This means you need the contours of the seabed to slope gradually along the beach, because the moment a wave breaks is determined by the depth of the water it’s moving through. You also need to understand the tides, which change the depth of the water throughout the day based on the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun.
In sum, to catch a wave you need a storm out at sea to produce waves big enough to travel across the ocean, towards a beach with an appropriately shaped seabed. You need them to arrive at just the right time of day to align with the tide. Then, if you’re there at exactly that moment, wetsuit on, surfboard in hand and ready, you might catch a sweet wave to shore. The exquisite timing of this confluence of events is what makes surfing such a special sport – it requires surfers to be completely in tune with the storms out at sea, the sun, the moon, and with the water they’re riding.
Computer Aided Design & The 118 Elements 
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