Wave Warning

What are the wild waves saying? For one thing, they may be warning of a storm 5,000 miles away. Last week Britain's Dr. George Edward Raven Deacon told a symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences how he makes waves spill their secrets.

Sunk on the ocean floor off Pendeen,

Cornwall, Dr. Deacon has an instrument that continuously measures the weight of water above it. As the waves sweep in from the North Atlantic, it records them all--big & little--on a strip of paper. Dr. Deacon studies the strip at his leisure. The ordinary visible waves do not interest him much. What he is looking for are long slow "swells," their crests 30 seconds apart, that cannot be detected except with the wave recorder.

When he catches a train of such waves, Dr. Deacon looks on the weather map to check on where they are coming from. Usually their origin is a storm far out toward North America. The wind may never reach England, but the long, low swells, sweeping along at 70 miles an hour, much faster than ordinary ocean waves, do not stop until they hit a shoreline. Dr. Deacon has measured waves at Pendeen which came all the way from a storm off Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.

Since the waves outrun the wind, they provide a handy method of spotting storms that are still far out at sea. This is not important in the North Atlantic, whose weather is reported by ships and airplanes almost from minute to minute. But between South Africa and South America, there are few ships, and only one small weather station, on the island of Tristan da Cunha. Since most storms in the area strike from the west, a wave recorder on the African coast might give a day or two of warning before a storm arrives. Dr. Deacon also believes that a competent oceanographer might make a good living by setting up a wave recorder on the coast of Chile and watching for storms approaching from the lonely South Pacific. When he noted the telltale swells, he could warn shipping companies (for a price) not to start loading cargo at poorly protected harbors.

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