What type of waves are the ocean (water) waves: longitudinal or transverse?
I’m going to take a guess that this might be a trick question. For the most part, ocean waves are known to be transverse as the water displacement is perpendicular to the propagation of the wave energy thus they’re transverse (observe the movement of a boat in a windless area of the ocean). The underlying processes are a little bit complex, and I won’t go into them, but just know this. As the ocean waves approaches shallow water, a frictional force is applied to the water medium that causes offsets in the displacement of the water, thus creating a mixture of transverse and longitudinal wave (which is what you will see on the beach).
