Lenticular clouds over the Andes’s Torres del Paine are a sign of gravity waves. By Eric HandThe Southern Ocean is famously stormy, home to waves taller than telephone poles.
Yet 50 kilometers overhead, the weather is just as tempestuous, if less obviously so. Powerful waves in the air break and crash, dumping energy into the stratosphere and disrupting winds that help control the climate.For about 2 decades, researchers have known that a region near 60° South, along the Drake Passage between the tip of South America and Antarctica, is the planet’s hot spot for these so-called gravity waves.
They have long suspected that the waves (not to be confused with the gravitational waves rippling through space) are launched by the mountains of the
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