How do waves always go in the direction of the shore, and what happens in the middle ground between the two directions? (lets say there is a sea with 2 lands on either side)

Question

When you look at a beach, the waves are always coming in the direction of the shore. On the other side of the shore, the waves are also coming in the direction of the land that’s opposite the one you’re on. Is there a middle ground in-between these wave directions where the waves are just flat and not going in either direction? Im from poland looking at the beach rn. Sweden is 170km away on the other side of the sea. the waves are coming in the direction of both shores. HOW? what happens in between the two shores, how do they just change directions. please help

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

Wind disturbs water.
If the water is disturbed and raises slightly in its disturbance, it is more likely to catch the wind.
The more likely it is to catch the wind, the more it disturbs the water around it and then that disturbed water raises up higher.

The water cannot stay raised, it has too much weight/energy so it falls and pushes the water underneath it, pushing the next section of water up, which then falls pushing the next section etc. etc.

The further this wave travels, the more water it collects as it is more likely to catch the wind, and it will effectively keep traveling until something stops it, Land.

Most of the time, the wind is towards the shore anyway, this is because the land heats up faster, (Specific Heat Capacity Land vs Water if you wanna look that up) which helps this affect, and if a small wave crashes into a bigger one, then they result in a net movement towards the direction of the bigger waves travel.

This can be summed up as:
Although initially the wind disturbs waves randomly, the largest waves will be produced by the largest distance of travel before hitting land. This means waves broadly speaking get emitted from the center of oceans towards land.