Waves Waves drive ocean currents, consume greenhouse gases and regulate our climate. Forget Point Break and Big Wednesday. A new movie for serious surf connoisseurs is revealing hitherto undocumented properties of waves. It's little use for dudes seeking the ultimate ride, but it should help researchers better understand how waves drive ocean currents, consume greenhouse gases and regulate our climate. Combining satellite positioning information and aerial video, Kendall Melville and Peter Matusov of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, have captured on camera the exact shape, size and formation of waves breaking in the open ocean for the first time. "We're at the beginning of being able to understand waves in a rational way," says Melville. The analysis reveals a mathematical relationship between wind speed, which causes waves, and the length of a breaking wave's crest. This should give oceanographers a better idea of how much of the sea surface interacts with the atmosphere under particular wind conditions. Melville and Matusov found that small waves just a metre or so apart are important in heat transfer; large ones, tens of metres apart, probably contribute most to currents. "It's quite a groundbreaking approach - these measurements are very difficult to do," says John Scott an oceanographer with Britain's Ministry of Defence technology spin-off company QinetiQ. There is a mathematical relationship between wind speed and the length of a breaking wave's crest. © Melville / Matusov Until now waves have only been studied using very distant satellites or from still aerial photographs. These images were related to movement by recreating waves in a laboratory. Melville and Matusov's technique "fills a big gap between those measurements", says Scott. Next Melville and Matusov hope to use their technique to probe hurricanes. Waves beneath highly active storms sometimes feed them warmth from the ocean, and sometimes generate spray that cools the air and slows them down. Accurate information on waves beneath hurricanes may well improve estimates of their duration. Breaking up White-capped waves cause far more than seasickness and shipwrecks. When they break and pass on their momentum to the ocean surface they push along ocean currents. A turbulent ocean surface also ferries more heat between the water and the atmosphere, which is crucial to the development of storms. The foaming of breaking waves is the ocean's way of breathing. Bubbles of air are carried tens of metres below the surface. The pressure on the bubbles forces gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen, and any pollutants they carry, into the water, where they remain. Likewise, bubbles bursting at the foamy surface release gas and salty particles into the atmosphere. These particles, known as aerosols, seed cloud formation and help to regulate the climate.