This thesis studies the time dependent evolution of MHD waves in cold, fully compressible non-uniform plasmas. We used a 1-D box model (e.g., Southwood (1974)) to study wave mode coupling, and concentrate upon developing an understanding of the underlying physics that governs waves in the Earth's magnetosphere. We begin by discussing the form of the (often singular) governing eigenmodes of the system, and subsequently use these eigenmodes as a basis with which to construct the solution to a variety of initial value problems. We consider a detailed analysis of both the widths and the internal length scales developed by cavity mode driven held line resonances (FLRs), and compare our results to observations presented in the literature.