This article explores the stability of stratified Couette flow in the viscous 3d Boussinesq equations. In this system, mixing effects arise from the shearing background, and gravity acts as a restoring force leading to dispersive internal gravity waves. These mechanisms are of fundamentally different nature and relevant in complementary dynamical regimes. Our study combines them to establish a bound for the nonlinear transition threshold, which is quantitatively larger than the inverse Reynolds number ν, and increases with stronger stratification resp. gravity.
