Last week, a bunch of my friends from robotics slept over at Emily's house, which is really close to the water of Pearl Harbor on Ford Island. Two of us couldn't sleep, so we ventured outside at 5 in the morning to watch the sunrise, though because of a combination of sleep deprivation and laziness I didn't pull out my phone to take a picture of it. It was cool, even if we were facing the wrong direction to see the Arizona memorial or the sunrise. As the sky gradually got lighter, I could see the ripples on the water, which was about 10 feet away . Suddenly, a small speed boat went by. A minute later, we heard a strange sloshing noise.
It took a couple of seconds for us to figure out that the sound was the waves made by the speed boat, although the boat had passed into the distance a while ago. The waves reached us so much after the sound and sight of the boat had passed because the wavespeed of the sound and of the light that allows us to see the boat was so much greater than the wave speed of the waves. However the amplitude and wavelength of the waves was much greater than that of the sounds. When the waves hit the shore, the energy of the waves changed to kinetic energy as the pebbles on the beach slide back and forth, and the collisions between the pebbles caused energy in the form of sound waves to be made.
I didn't take a picture, so we'll have to deal with google ones for now... :P Though this is pretty close to what it looked like.
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