How the canyon bends your swell
First OrderThe Scripps / La Jolla submarine canyon is a permanent lens carved into the seafloor off San Diego — it decides which beaches a swell hits hard and which it barely reaches. Pick a swell below: the map shows what the canyon alone does to it — red where it makes the surf bigger, blue where it makes it smaller.
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This swell
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canyon makes it bigger
no change
canyon makes it smaller
The experiment behind the map
Every swell here is simulated twice — over the real seafloor and over a control seafloor with the canyon smoothed away. Left pair: the two seafloors; the canyon is the dark V. Right pair: the wave height each one produces for the swell you have dialled in. Where the two oceans disagree is exactly what the canyon does — that disagreement is the map above.
seafloor depth
0100 m400 m
wave height of this swell (relative)
smallerbigger