SEICHE

Wild Word Friday!

I really didn’t know that such a thing as a SEICHE (pronounced saysh) even existed until I saw one in our bay.  So what am I talking about?  Some strange extraterrestrial being? An exotic fresh water fish species? Nope. I’m talking about the tendency of an enclosed body of water to churn  in its basin.

The word SEICHE comes to us from a Swiss hydrologist named François-Alphonse Forel. In 1890 or thereabouts, Forel gave the name to the phenomenon he had observed taking place in or on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. He didn’t come up with the word all by himself, but merely promoted a long-used Swiss-French local dialect label – SEICHE – which means to sway back and forth.  If he had studied the same phenomenon in the area where I live, he probably would have used our local term, which is a much more scientific and highbrow word –  slosh.

A SEICHE can be caused by a variety of disturbances, including high winds, changes in atmospheric pressure, earthquakes and tsunamis. The day I looked out the front windows of our house and saw the rapid retreat of the water from our shoreline was an instance of unusual SEICHE activity. Most times the water shifts only a few inches and very gradually.  The SEICHE I saw gave us about 30 additional feet of beach for nearly half an hour of time.

I believe that noticeable SEICHEs may be more common than many scientists think. I seem to remember my kids producing bathtub SEICHEs quite frequently. As in, “Mom, we need a mop!”

Have you ever seen a SEICHE? (Or caused one?)

Blessings!

Sue

(Some information and photo from Wikipedia.)