You've got a sound wave traveling merrily along through one medium, when suddenly it hits a different medium, what does gonna happen then?

The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

"It's like a sponge - the gas sucks up heat in one location and then gets transported by the sound wave to another location where the heat gets squeezed out of the gas," he says.