
Machine produces the largest human-made waves in the world - jellekralt
http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/10/machine-produces-largest-humanmade-waves-world
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mirimir
If you're in Amsterdam, and have a little free time, I highly recommend the
Normaal Amsterdams Peil visitor center in the City Hall.[0] There are large
sight gauges, showing the water level at various points in the canal system.
It gives a great sense of how far below the North Sea surface you may be.

[0]
[http://www.normaalamsterdamspeil.nl/en/](http://www.normaalamsterdamspeil.nl/en/)

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protomyth
That's nice. Devils Lake ND went with a little blue wave sign attached to the
street lights to tell you how high the lake level is. It does make a person
very mindful of what happens if the dike breaks.

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markbnj
You can see that the reflected waves have a big impact on the shape of the
incoming waves as soon as the first of them reach the far end. I'm no
hydrologist but it seems to me that the shape of the trough concentrates this
effect in a way that would not happen in a more natural open environment like
a shore or dike. I suppose they can account for this in their experiments.
Very cool machine in any case. I love large-scale experimentation like this.

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tlarkworthy
We have a wave generator at my old university, nothing to that scale, but it
it had an array of paddles on one edge of a cube, and you could generate
different shapes of wave. Like a CNC wave generator. You could even generate a
swirling vortex. It was a pretty cool thing. We tested robots and offshore
energy harvestors.

[http://osl.eps.hw.ac.uk/virtualPages/experimentalCapabilitie...](http://osl.eps.hw.ac.uk/virtualPages/experimentalCapabilities/Lab%20facilities.php)

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lmilcin
Not largest human-made waves by any definition of largest or human-made.

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mrob
Largest I can think of are waves produced by underwater nuclear tests.
Wikipedia claims the Operation Crossroads test produced 29m high waves, and
that was only 23kt yield.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads#Sequence_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads#Sequence_of_blast_events)

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Retric
Those are not active right now. It's the difference between oldest living
person, and longest a person has ever lived.

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binarymax
Here is a good video that shows how the (older) delta flume was used in the
application of developing "living shorelines", as noted at the bottom of the
article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDwoq71bCPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDwoq71bCPw)

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samstave
That is super cool. I would love to know though how long the willow branch
mattress would last though before vegetation growing on it would also help it
rot, get water logged and sink.

Would one also want to include the drum based floats underneath to help keep
it above water?

It would be interesting to see these made and just placed out in various areas
to grow, like little artificial islands or marsh patches. It would also be a
boon to the willow stick industry :-) (any idea why they picked willow
branches aside from the fact that the willow just grows a boat-load of vine-y
sticks?) (pun intended)

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Arnt
MACHINE produces the largest HUMAN-made... wait, what?

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glaberficken
Human made machine produces largest machine made waves ever? Is that ok for
you =)

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Grustaf
And not a single surfer showed up!

