An investigation is made into the trapping of surface gravity waves by totally submerged three-dimensional obstacles and strong numerical evidence of the existence of trapped modes is presented. The specific geometry considered is a submerged elliptical torus. The depth of submergence of the torus and the aspect ratio of its cross-section are held fixed and a search for a trapped mode is made in the parameter space formed by varying the radius of the torus and the frequency. A plane wave approximation to the location of the mode in this space is derived and an integral equation and a side condition for the exact trapped mode are obtained. Each of these conditions is satisfied on a different line in the plane and the point at which the lines cross corresponds to a trapped mode. Although it is not possible to locate this point exactly, because of numerical error, existence of the mode may be inferred with confidence as small changes in the numerical results do not alter the fact that the lines cross.

If the torus makes small vertical oscillations, it is customary to try to express the fluid velocity as the gradient of the so-called heave potential, which is assumed to have the same time dependence as the body oscillations. A necessary condition for the existence of this potential at the trapped mode frequency is derived and numerical evidence is cited which shows that this condition is not satisfied for an elliptical torus. Calculations of the heave potential for such a torus are made over a range of frequencies, and it is shown that the force coefficients behave in a singular fashion in the vicinity of the trapped mode frequency. An analysis of the time domain problem for a torus which is forced to make small vertical oscillations at the trapped mode frequency shows that the potential contains a term which represents a growing oscillation.