If there was no land for tsunami waves to collide with, can the waves travel around the globe for forever?
[Physics] Will tsunami waves travel forever if there was no land
dissipationsolitonstsunamiwaterwaves
Related Solutions
The positive or negative elevation of the leading wave is related to what happened to the ocean floor during the earthquake. If the seabed was raised, a crest should lead the tsunami; if it was lowered then a trough leads.
In the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, a piece of seabed of about 1000 km x 100 km went down a few meters. Another strip, located to the west of the first and with roughly the same size, went up. Because of this, the wave moving east (towards Thailand) was led by a trough. The one moving west, which reached Sri Lanka, India and Africa, was led by a crest.
This is seen in the simulation of that tsunami shown below (by Kenji Satake, of the Active Fault Research Center in Tsukuba, Japan). In the red areas the water surface is higher than normal, and in the blue ones it is lower.
A similar animation, with some data added, is at http://es.ucsc.edu/~ward/indo.mov
For example, in solids, the velocities of transverse and the longitudinal waves depend on the shear modulus and compressive modulus, respectively, and shear modulus is less than compression modulus (the velocities also depend on the density, which is the same for both types of waves).
Best Answer
The waves will not travel forever.
Water particles moving against and around each other will have friction, and the friction will cause motion energy to be converted to heat (which will dissipate throughout the water and air). The wave will eventually cease to exist unless energy is added.