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Oceanic worlds shouldn't be described as having smooth waters
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Linna Excel
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#1 - 2012-07-04 22:21:46 UTC
I checked info on a water world the other day and this description bothered me a little from a factual standpoint. Waves are created by winds. Land breaks up wind or at least slows it down. If you have long stretches of ocean without any land, you can get strong winds and very large waves. If you look at the waters between south america and antiartica you see a zone with strong winds and large waves. This makes sense because it is the only place in the world where winds can travel around the globe without being interrupted by land.

If you had an entire world with little to no land masses, I would suspect it of having pretty high waves.

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mxzf
Shovel Bros
#2 - 2012-07-04 23:07:33 UTC
I would think it would depend more on the sea floor. I'm not an expert, and haven't done any research, but I would think that waves would be caused by water getting forced past points where the water gets shallower.

If the sea floor of a oceanic planet was relatively smooth, or deep enough that the surface currents are not significantly affected by the sea floor, I wouldn't think there would be much of any waves to speak of. It seems that you would end up with fast moving currents over the entire surface, but not really any waves, since there wouldn't be anything to actually push the water up into a wave.
Linna Excel
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#3 - 2012-07-05 00:32:00 UTC
For the most part, that isn't true from what I know. The only exception I can think of is a tsunami, but that is sort of a special case.

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