Wave Breaking and Ocean Mixing

Abstract

Wave breaking is not a phenomenon specific only to the surface water waves. Electromagnetic waves, waves in plasmas and other media also break. This is how this phenomenon is described in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave breaking): “In physics, a breaking wave is a wave whose amplitude reaches a critical level at which some process can suddenly start to occur that causes large amount of wave energy to be dissipated. At this point, simple physical models describing the dynamics of the wave will often become invalid, particularly those which assume linear behavior.”