image source: seafloor.csumb.edu/Map_Gallery
I wonder sometimes if America’s obsession with surfing is due for an ebb tide. Haven’t all the good waves have been surfed already? Is the demand for “Endless Summer” movies really endless? Is there anything left to say about this sport?
However, after attending a lecture on the science of surfing last night, I feel we’re much more in the middle of the session than riding a last one in toward the beach. I arrived late at Axis Café to find it was standing-room only with curious people spilling out the door. Playing on a giant screen was a short film by KQED’s Quest about the science of big waves like Mavericks. All 150 people watched mesmerized as the giant green walls of water reared and roared.
Both of the evening’s speakers were big-wave experts, but with perspectives that could hardly be more different. One was Toby Garfield, a professor of geological sciences at San Francisco State and one of the Bay Area’s leading authorities on waves and the ocean floor. His counterpoint was Grant Washburn, one of the best surfers ever to ply Mavericks. (The professor had a paunch, and the surfer a set of shoulders like Aquaman’s.)
What they had in common was a fascination with how waves form. Washburn, it turns out, brings a scientist’s eye to his sessions at Ocean Beach, having recorded his observations of ocean conditions daily for the last 20 years. “Being a surfer is just being a data object out there,” he quipped.
The most interesting revelation is that the charting of the sea floor off of Northern California is just getting underway. Garfield mentioned that in the next few years, our knowledge of the bathymetry – or underwater depth – of the coast will become more exacting as new data comes online. Combined with steadily increasing knowledge of storms, wind and swell, forecasts of surf conditions will get far more accurate. How this will change surfing is anyone’s guess.
image source: San Francisco Chronicle
The science of wave prediction is building, as evidenced by Garfield’s current crop of protégés. Three of his grad students are themselves surfers, drawn to careers in science because of their curiosity about the winds, swells, ridges and sandbars that make waves happen.
The crowd – studious types with thick glasses, surfers with their lustrous tans, fleece-clad environmentalists – had lots of questions. There were high-school students. There was a grandmother who didn’t even know how to swim.
With interest that broad, I imagine the surf movies will draw long popcorn lines for years to come.
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