Overview

"Waves across the Pacific" is a documentary featuring Dr. Walter Munk and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. In 1963, Munk conducted an experiment tracing the course of waves and wave energy from their origins in Antarctica to the shores of Alaska. Oceanographers had speculated for some time that Antarctic storms generate enormous waves which can be detected half-way around the globe. The experiment included development of special instrumentation to detect waves and installation of recording stations along points in the Pacific (including use of the new Floating Instrument Platform, FLIP). The experiment collected some ten million data points on tape documenting waves from 12 major storms; with computer analysis of the data, the scientists succeeded in plotting the wave climate across the Pacific.