Internal waves are a fundamentally important mechanism for transporting energy and momentum in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. Understanding where and how these waves break and dissipate their energy presents a significant challenge to observationalists and fluid dynamicists alike. Using data from numerical simulations, we present a dynamic visualisation of the inherently three-dimensional refraction and eventual breaking of an internal wavepacket in a stable background horizontal current. Surprisingly, in this setting the total amount of energy dissipated by turbulence may be much larger than the initial wave energy, suggesting a significant release of energy from the background flow.
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