Gigantic ocean waves, spanning hundreds of kilometres from crest to crest, have been speeding up thanks to global warming, a new model suggests.
Geophysicists predict that as the ocean surface warms, these so-called planetary waves should speed up. To test this idea, John Fyfe and Oleg Saenko at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, modelled the changes to ocean wave patterns over the 20th and 21st centuries.
“We were really surprised at how quickly the ocean responded to temperature change,” Fyfe says. According to the model, global warming has already increased the speed of the waves, but no one noticed because satellites have not…
