Bores and nonlinear waves

...the waters piled up. The surging waters stood firm like a wall... -- Exodus 15:8a

What is a bore? The answers will vary depending on whether one is at a cocktail party, the
banks of the River Severn in England or the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia (to name but two of
many geographical locations). We will focus our attention on tidal bores, which as David Lynch
points out in an article of the same title, are remarkable hydrodynamic phenomena. A tidal bore
is the incoming tide in the form of a wave (technically, it is called a solitary wave) moving
upstream in a river that empties into the sea. Even after the bore passes a particular location, the
river flows upstream for a while before the current reverts to its normal direction. Not every such
river will support such bores; there are two conditions which are necessary for such phenomena
to occur. The first is that the tides in the adjoining bay must be very high, with at least a 20 ft
difference between high and low tides (in the Bay of Fundy, for example, the difference can be
as much as 55 ft. Seeing the tide come in is an impressive sight.). Secondly, the topography must
be right, i.e. the river must be shallow with a gently sloping bottom and the estuary must be
broad and funnel-shaped (the latter condition will be incorporated in a mathematical model
below). This forces the incoming tide to build in height as it moves upstream until a `wavefront'
is born and propagates in the same direction. This wave is one of several types of solitary wave
(see the section on nonlinear waves later in this chapter); although water is a fundamental
medium in which they are generated and propagated, they are known to occur in many other
environments and contexts -- the atmosphere (including that of Mars!), optics, molecular
biology, plasma physics, and many others outside the scope of this book. On rare occasions, a
`non-bore' river may support a bore as a result of a tsunami propagating across the ocean, the
latter occurring because of seismic or volcanic activity on the ocean floor.

The most commonly cited distinguishing feature of solitary waves is that they do not disperse;
they can maintain their essential features (such as shape and speed) over large distances provided
no significant changes in their environment (such as water depth) occur. The reason for this is
that being nonlinear, they have the capacity to "keep at bay" the effects of wave dispersion (and
in some cases frictional dissipation), i.e. there is a balance between the competing effects of
growth and decay. This can be thought of as a nonlinear version of the linear surface gravity
wave in shallow water, which as we have seen, is non-dispersive because every individual
component of an initial disturbance (after a sufficiently long time) travels at the same speed
(unlike the case of such waves travelling in deep water where component waves of different
wavelengths mutually separate). The interaction -- or lack of it -- between such waves
determines what type of travelling waveform will occur. In practice of course, solitary waves
will not go on for ever. Energy is drained from them by friction on the bottom of the channel,
and also by viscosity, which is akin to friction between the layers of fluid. Both effects ultimately
generate heat with consequent loss of wave energy. Additionally, changes in the channel
topography such as widening can reduce the speed of the bore to such a degree that it is
eventually carried downstream by the stronger current.
 What are some other characteristics of tidal bores? They are somewhat unpredictable insofar
as they vary in time and space: from tide to tide and from river to river. They can be as high as
25 ft or as small as a few inches (though the latter do not usually draw thousands of visitors each
year, unlike some of the larger ones, that which used to occur on the River Seine in France being
one notable example). Typically they are higher near the banks than they are in mid-channel.
Since they are harbingers of the turning tide, they are largest around the time of the new moon or
the full moon, when the tides are largest. As already noted, after the wave passes, the river
continues to flow upstream for a while, and so the wavefront represents a demarcation front
between two parts of the river with opposite directions of flow. Since the water level behind the
bore is higher than that ahead of it, the river flows upstream but downhill. The bore may be
manifested as a breaking, foaming, turbulent crest like that on a shelving beach, or as a non-
turbulent, gently-rounded wave, known as an undular bore. The latter are frequently followed by
smaller waves; Lynch observed as many as 55 such waves behind a bore on an Amazon
tributary. Which type of bore occurs depends on the height of the tide, wind speed and direction,
the local depth of the river and shape of the bottom. Indeed, many bores are of mixed type, being
undular in the middle region of the river and breaking towards the banks, and they may change
as they propagate if the river topography changes. Bald eagles are known to prefer turbulent
bores; they have been observed in Alaska to hunt fish by following bores moving inland from the
Pacific Ocean -- the fish are brought to the surface by the turbulence of the bore. The fish
presumably prefer undular bores.

To appreciate the mechanism of bore formation we must spend a little time discussing the
tides. The predominant tide-producing object is the moon (the sun's tidal effect is less than half
that of the moon as will be shown later in this chapter). To simplify matters, we will ignore the
solar tidal contribution, the complex interaction between land and sea (including the impeding
effects of land mass), and also the much smaller land tides that are produced by the moon and
sun. Tides are produced as a result of differential gravitational forces, and on a planet totally
covered by water, this would produce two tidal `bulges' with maxima lying on a line joining the
earth and moon centers-of-mass, but on opposite sides of the earth. They travel around the earth
with a period of about 28 days, which is the orbital period of the moon, so the rotation of the
earth causes any particular location on the surface to `pass through' each tidal maximum (and
minimum) about once each day. Things are more complicated than this, of course, in particular
because the moon revolves around the earth in the same rotational direction as the earth rotates.
This means that the tidal bulges have moved forward somewhat by the time a given point on the
earth's surface has undergone a half rotation, so there is rather more than 12 hours between tides;
it is closer to 12 hours 25 minutes. This is not the case everywhere, because of the above-
mentioned interference of the land masses with these tidal oscillations; some places have only
one tide per day, and some (such as Tahiti) have little or none. This is because Tahiti lies on a
node -- a stationary point about which the tidal standing wave oscillates. Obviously this is a very
important place to visit and conduct further scientific research…