Scientists exploring the deep sea have discovered a distinctive kind of breaking wave. The finding reveals the presence of a subtle new force that can stir the dark seabed, and it helps to explain some of the nuances of planetary recycling and the provision of food to abyssal life.

The discovery also illustrates the radical nature of the insights that lay behind the start of the scientific revolution some four centuries ago.

The deep waves have the distinguishing curl of Kelvin-Helmholtz billows, a type of wave present throughout nature. Scientists have long tracked these distinctive waves, finding them on the windblown sea, on sand dunes, among clouds and even in the churning gases of Saturn and Jupiter. They originate when two fluids, or gases, (or sea and air), move past one another at different speeds. At the boundary, the interaction produces a sequence of crests that rise gently and then curl into chaotic turbulence. In their early stages, the waves produce the kind of slopes that surfers dream about.

In a first, scientists from the Netherlands and France found the breaking waves rippling down the sides of an underwater mountain in the Atlantic some 700 miles south of the Azores. On Feb. 6, in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, the scientists reported how a network of temperature sensors that they moored at a depth of a half kilometer, or a third of a mile, gave strong evidence of the passing waves.