A fact that often goes underappreciated when your local is firing on all cylinders is that waves often travel hundreds if not thousands of miles before they’re fit to ride. What’s more, rarely do we take the time to appreciate that we (mostly solid states of mass) armed with surfboards (also solids) are capable of sliding atop the surface of a liquid thanks to a complex principal in physics called buoyancy.
When you remove yourself from the act a bit to appreciate the surfing behind science, there are a multitude of aspects to the sport that we tend to take for granted but are actually pretty amazing. And this recent short from animation studio Wonderlust perfectly pulls back the veil of the sport we’re so intimately familiar with to reveal the complex physics concepts that make the sport possible in the first place.
The only shortcoming is a scientific explanation for how noseriding is possible, but that’s for another time.
