Explain briefly, why some waves break as they reach the shore?
Imagine a rug being pushed against a wall. As the front hits the wall it stops, but the end of the rug continues to move and folds up on top of the front of the rug. The same theory sort of applies with waves, except the rug is water and the wall is the sea floor. i.e the water on the surface is not being blocked by the sea floor and continues to move fast but the water underneath it slows down because it’s being distrupted by the sea floor and so the water on the surfaces soon has nothing to be on and crashes. That’s the best I could do to explain it…
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 amounts 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. The most generally familiar sort of breaking wave is the breaking of water surface waves on a coastline. Because of the horizontal component of the fluid velocity associated with the wave motion, wave crests steepen as the amplitude increases; wave breaking generally occurs where the amplitude reaches the point that the crest of the wave actually overturns — though the types of breaking water surface waves are discussed in more detail below. Certain other effects in fluid dynamics have also been termed “breaking waves”, partly by analogy with water surface waves. In meteorology, gravity waves are said to break when the wave produces regions where the pot
