This wall of water combines with the surface-level wave. At this point, the canyon's inbound water gets pushed upward as it hurtles toward the Portuguese shore. Nazaré Canyon ends right by Nazaré's Praia do Norte (North Beach). The rest of the water pushes forward, creating the same kind of wave that happens anywhere a continent meets the sea. Long period swells (1220 seconds) can bring waves that average 1.54.5 m in height, with extraordinary extreme wave heights of up. Some of the water dives into the canyon while still propelling forward. During the months of October through March, it is typical for storms that begin off the coast of Japan to spin across the north Pacific basin toward Alaska and send organized swells directly to the North Shore. When inbound waves speed toward the Portuguese coast, Nazaré Canyon splits them in two.
And it's this canyon that turns normal waves into monsters.
It's home to the Nazaré Canyon, an underwater trench that is 140 miles (230 kilometers) long and up to 16,000 feet (4,877 meters) deep. But just off the coast, the ocean floor is anything but normal. When conditions are calm offshore, you can actually have a very normal beach day at Nazaré. That's because this stretch of coastline is no ordinary beach.Īt first glance, Nazaré looks like your typical European beach with a sandy shore and (for much of the year) relatively placid waters. The same thing happens at Nazaré, only on a much more dramatic scale. As the moving water approaches shore, emerging land pushes that water upward, and it rises into a curl before breaking under the downward force of gravity. Your standard, everyday wave breaks on the beach because water has run out of real estate. One of the other factors behind those monster waves is the layout of the ocean floor. That's right, the waves crashing on the beach were started by gusts of wind somewhere offshore.īut it takes more than just wind to craft the truly massive waves surfed by the likes of Maya Gabeira, Sebastian Steudtner and Garrett McNamara at Nazaré. However, most of the time, ocean waves come from good old wind. In a not-so-funny scenario, cascading waves called tsunamis come from underwater earthquakes that literally shake the ocean. On the open water, waves might appear as wake from a speedboat driven by a guy having a midlife crisis. In a swimming pool, it might be when the neighborhood bully does a massive cannonball off the high dive. Real-life experience tells us that many things can disturb a body of water.
#Pictures of huge ocean waves at north shore download#
Ocean waves occur when something disturbs the water. Download this stock image: Big Ocean Waves on the north shore of Oahu - E1E847 from Alamy's library of millions of high resolution stock photos, illustrations and vectors.
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