From the Vault: The Great Wave

For centuries, sailors have told stories of mountainous killer waves that rise out of the ocean without warning. Join Robert and Joe for a discussion of the history and science of rogue waves. (originally published 5/30/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to dive into the vault. This time we're doing
an episode that originally aired on May nineteen. This one
was called The Great Wave. It was about giant waves,
rogue waves. I remember this episode being very interesting, especially
because in preparing for it, it was when I, uh,

(00:28):
I learned about the the incredible survival by sea voyage
of was it the Shackleton Expedition? Yes, I believe so. Yeah.
So this one, this one is filled with aquatic peril
and uh and I seem to recall there's a fair
amount of sort of looking at at historical accounts and

(00:49):
people weighing in on exactly what kind of wave we
were talking about. Here, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
A production of I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, you,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm want to

(01:10):
kick off this episode by talking about a piece of art.
And it's a piece of art that I imagine a
lot of you have seen and if you haven't seen it.
You can, and you're not driving a vehicle or anything
right now, you can easily look it up and you
can certainly find it for the landing page for this episode.
It's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. It is
a Japanese print. It is a title the Great Wave

(01:31):
off Kanagawa, and it's a nineteenth century Edo period would
block print by Katsushika Hokusai, and it depicts a great
wave endangering ships off the coast of Kanagawa. And it
was once thought to depict a tsunami, but now most
commentators think that it actually depicts a rogue wave. UM. Now,

(01:55):
the the artist here, he explored this subject matter many
times in his career, so if you look at other
images he created, there are plenty of other waves, but
this particular print is considered the peak the culmination of
sixty years in the arts. UM And since it's a
woodblock print and not a painting, you can actually find
it in numerous museums around the world, thus increasing the

(02:16):
odds that you have seen this image, if not online
and perhaps in purpose in person. But I think one
of the great things about it is that it captures
a sense of the majesty of a great wave. The
idea that it's it's there's like a topography of the
ocean visible, the ocean surface visible in this picture. That

(02:36):
that reminds us that a wave can be a mountain. Well, yeah,
and the wave in the in the woodblock even what
do you call it a print or a painting when
it's the painting whatever it is on this image, Uh,
the wave resembles the mountain in the background, and the
mountain and the backgrounds has sort of a blue gray,
uh slope, and then the white peak of course covered

(02:57):
in snow. The waves are much like that with these
uh the white surging foam at the top. But in
the painting, the foam as these like hooks that almost
looked like eagles talents reaching out of the top of
this wall of water. And there's there's a way that
I at least often look to this painting without even
realizing they were supposed to be boats represented at the bottom. Yeah,

(03:18):
it's kind of easy to miss the boats. They're they're
swallowed up by what's going on all around. It's a
beautiful piece of art. And I don't know why, but
I've always when I've looked at it before thought of
it as somehow calming or like a picture of sort
of like serene nature, which is hilarious because it's depicting
a scene of utter chaos and destruction and terror, right,

(03:40):
I mean it's spoken like a true landsman, right when
clearly like this is a product of of an island
culture that it was very you know, very aware of
the dangers posed by the by the ocean. And uh yeah,
because I probably am in the same same boat. Uh No.
Pun intended with you is that when I've seen the
image in the past, it was just I was like, ah, yeah,

(04:01):
serene nature. But no, this is a cresting mountain of
oceanic destruction, or at least potential destruction in terms of
human activities on or near the ocean the mountain that flows.
So speaking of the dangers of the ocean, I mean,
there are many of them, and we know what many

(04:21):
of them are. But we often discuss ancient beastiaries and
records of monsters and strange creatures from the ancient world,
and of course some of the best ones, even through
like the medieval period, are of sea monsters. So you've
got these stories about lizards that kill with the gaze
or giant sea monsters that suck entire ships into their mouths,
And they can be funny to read about now, especially

(04:43):
with the certainty that ancient writers had when they talked
about these subjects. But one point I've made before and
that I want to echo again is I think it
was not at all stupid or irrational for ancient people's
to believe in sea monsters. I think it was a
perfectly reasonable and rap channel thing for them to assume.
And there are a few reasons for this. We've touched

(05:03):
on some of them on the show before. Number one,
there actually are sea monsters in a way. We just
call them by different names now, like you know the
sperm whale, blue whale, giant squid, the sunfish, the lion's
main jellyfish. These are all giant, magnificent, all inspiring creatures.
But what's changed is that we've fit them into a
standard evolutionary taxonomy. We think of them as animals that

(05:25):
have common origins with the other animals. But when ancient
sailors told stories of these giant beasts out in the ocean, meany,
we're probably telling the truth to the best of their ability.
They saw something huge and strange and terrifying, and they're
trying to remember and describe what it was. And then
on top of that, you're dealing with it with just
a culture and a legacy um of of danger upon

(05:48):
the sea and beneath the sea. Yes, so there were
those two things come together. I mean, here there'll be monsters,
right exactly. And because the sea, you know, a life
at sea has long I think, been associated with the
kind of with a kind of daring and bravado. Right.
But also I think there's another reason it was sort
of rational to believe in giant krakens that could pull

(06:09):
ships down to their doom. And it's that Poseidon is
one of the cruelest and most fickle of the gods.
That that's not an accident that the Greek myths are
like that it is not at all uncommon for ships
to set sail on the high seas and then just vanish,
leaving behind no trace. At all. Other times you might
find a giant, sturdy ship wrecked with no apparent cause,

(06:31):
like it's masked and rigging, smashed bits, with giant holes
blown in its solid hull. And when when you see
rex like this, uh, In fact, some of the Rex
I was looking at in preparation for this episode. It
calls to mind, uh, I was thinking about that poem
we've talked about on the show before, Alfred Lord Tennyson's
The Kraken, where you know, there's this beast battening upon

(06:51):
huge sea worms in his sleep until the latter fire
shall heat the deep and he comes up to the surface.
And of course in the poem he dies. But what's
more likely, say, he's actually gonna like punch a hole
right in the middle of your ship. Now, obviously there
are many ways for ships to wreck and sync causing
them to vanish without a trace. They can hit rocks,
they can hit hidden reefs, they can capsize and take

(07:13):
on water. But there is one particular phenomenon that sailors
have long been telling these dark, majestically terrifying stories about,
and it's something that could explain many sudden disappearances of
seagoing vessels if it was anything more than a fantasy.
And it's what you mentioned about the woodblock painting earlier.
The monster wave, the rogue wave also known as a

(07:36):
freak wave, which I like because it sounds like either
a musical subgenre or some sort of like misfit style
punk band, you know, freak wave. It's a genre that
mixes punk music with carnival music and circus music. No,
I you know, I say that, but I bet that's
actually a genre somewhere. Probably at this point all sub
genres exist. But so, yeah, the the idea of a

(07:59):
rogue wave or a monster waves, so we're not just
talking about rough seas in general, but a single gigantic wave,
an unbelievably high a wall of water that appears as
if out of nowhere and crashes over your ship like
a hammer of the sea gods, and so sailors have
talked about this, and we want to ask today, could
these tales be true? Do we now know whether they're true?

(08:21):
And could they explain many of histories vanished ships and
hulls broken like toys. Now at this point, I do
want to mention that in our research, I think we'd
hope to maybe throw in more like a giant wave myths,
more accounts from say, ancient histories of of giant waves
as opposed to organic sea monsters. And I'm not saying

(08:43):
they don't exist. They may very well exist. But I
had trouble finding them, and we're discussing why that might be.
I mean, we could go back to what you said earlier,
how a ship disappears at sea, perhaps caused by a
giant wave, and the story is about a sea monster,
or it becomes about an organic sea monster. Yes. Uh.
And one point of parallel here is that obviously even

(09:03):
the ancient people's knew about the idea that the ship
could encounter, say, bad weather while I was out at sea,
and be wrecked and and all that. So it's not
like there was no other way for ships to sink.
But the way in which a rogue wave as a
concept resembles a sea monster is is that it's unexpected,
you know that, that it reaches up out of the deep,
that it's much higher than all the other waves in

(09:24):
the in the ocean, and it just takes you completely
by surprise. And that's key here. It's not a situation
of like, oh, suddenly all the waves were enormous. No,
suddenly one wave stands vastly um above all the others,
much like the mountain of a wave in the print
we were discussing at the top of the episode. Now,
obviously lots of ships in history of encountered rough seas,

(09:44):
like certain regions of the ocean and certain weather patterns
can generate lots of chop and high waves. But ships
are usually made to withstand bad weather. That's part of
what ship design is for. You know, you say, okay,
might encounter this kind of weather, so we need to
make it this amounts strong to withstand it. Right, Like,
if you know you're going around the cape, you're gonna

(10:04):
you're gonna build and sail vessels designed for for rough seas. Yeah,
and these wave patterns have long been understood to be
predictable within certain parameters. You make a ship strong and
she'll hold. But what we're talking about with these monster
waves stories is a wave that suddenly appears without warning
and is at least twice as high as all the
other waves in the sea. And of course, when you're

(10:27):
talking about a wave of water that's twice as high
as the other waves around it, uh, it's something where
you know, the power and destructiveness of it doesn't just
scale linearly. You know, it becomes a new kind of
phenomenon you're dealing with. Now, I want to be I
want to be clear here that we're talking about true
rogue waves or monster waves, freak waves, etcetera. Here, Uh,

(10:47):
that do seem to come out of nowhere. And they're
not to be confused with giant waves generated by seismic activity,
right like underwater volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or cascades like riding,
though those can be incredible and I mean, just for
an example, um, I was reading about the earthquake generated
tsunami in Alaska's LaToya Bay, which, according to Discover magazine,

(11:10):
was a four hundred feet taller than the Empire State Building. Yeah,
they're they're people have done like illustrations of this online.
You can find where it's It's just staggering like it
it created this. I think it was supposed to be
like seventeen hundred feet roughly. Yeah. According to the University
of Alaska Fairbanks quote, the earthquake shook loose millions of
cubic yards of dirt and rocks from a forty degree

(11:33):
slope in the northeast corner of the bay. The rock
mass displaced a large body of water, causing both of
the splash wave that rose to one thousand, seven hundred
forty feet and a gravity wave that was one fifty
feet high. At the head of the bay. The waves
sheared and stripped the bark from thousands of trees, some
of them four ft in diameter, just clear cut the

(11:54):
land next to the bay. Yeah, and this occurred in
night again, but they seem seemingly something like it occurred
at the same area in thirty six and also in
the eighteen fifties and eighteen seventy four as well. So
that's just a taste of the destructive possibilities of seismically
generated waves in shallow coastal areas. Yeah, and of course

(12:14):
so we've got tsunamis as well. Tsunamis happen when something
happens out in the ocean. Uh, there's like an earthquake,
you know, shift in the sea floor and eruptions something
like that, and then there's a pressure wave that goes
throughout the water column towards the shore. As it nears
the shore. Of course, as it enters the shallow waters,
that's when it becomes really destructive because that mass of
pressure it rises up out of the water and it

(12:36):
you know, keeps coming and flooding against the shore, taking
whatever is on the shore along with it. Yeah. No, No, obviously,
atmospheric conditions are complicated, as we've discussed on the show before,
the complex systems, a lot of forces conversion together, it
becomes very difficult to predict atmospheric conditions and weather conditions
increasingly far in the future. And of course we have

(12:58):
a very similar situation with the movement of the fluids
in the ocean. But uh, but but with these cases,
they make a lot more sense to us, right, the tsunami,
the earthquake generated tsunami, because we can we can easily say, well,
this is the thing, this is the great event that
caused the great wave. And the idea of a wave
just coming out seemingly out of nowhere the sources as

(13:23):
is seeming a little more elusive, like it seems to
be emerging from the complex interplay of different storm patterns
and occurrents. Yeah, you might be just out in a
storm with waves that are pretty regular, certain height, coming
and going and going and going and going, and then
there's one suddenly the mountain arrives, or so the stories
tell us. Right, So the question is wind sailors tell

(13:44):
these stories? Are they true? And so I thought maybe
we should look at a couple of first hand accounts.
You ready, Robert, let's do it. Who's our first adventure? Well,
I thought we should turn to one first hand account
from the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, which came for the
famous voyage of the James Cared. Now, this voyage was
one part of the overall survival journey after the failure

(14:08):
of Shackleton's Antarctic expedition in a ship called the Endurance
that started in nineteen fourteen. And this is an absolutely
astounding survival story that is worth looking up if you've
never read it. And this is this is only one
part of the story, um, but the short version of
the context here was a nineteen fourteen Shackleton and crew
set out for Antarctica in this ship, the Endurance. But

(14:30):
the ship became trapped in ice in the wet El Sea,
and the ship eventually sank. And of course this was
nineteen fourteen or fifteen. You're in Antarctica that you know,
your ship sinking is sort of a death sentence. Yeah,
I mean even today, it's very bad news. So the
crew made their way, you know, they're out there stranded,
and the crew made their way to an uninhabited island

(14:52):
known as Elephant Island. From after where the ship sank,
and Shackleton reasoned that their only hope of survival was
seeking help and enforcement from the island of South Georgia,
where he knew that there was a whaling station. So
if they got to where the people were at the
whaling station there, they could, you know, come back for
rescue with the bigger ship. But South Georgia was about

(15:12):
eight hundred miles or hundred kilometers away over terrible seas.
You know the seas around Antarctica are you know, there's
they're icy, there's rough, bad weather. It's not a place
to be sailing in an unreinforced vessel. And the only
viable vessel they had for making the voyage because remember
their ships, saying that the best thing they had to
use was a twenty two foot or about six and

(15:34):
a half meter lifeboat called the James Care. So Shackleton
and a few others that they left the rest of
the crew sheltered at Elephant Island, and they set out
on this brutal journey to get a rescue party, during
which they encountered ice and bad weather. The story is
harrowing and amazing. They talked about how you know ice
would keep building up on the boat because it's freezing,

(15:56):
and they'd be soaked by all these horrible waves that
are pounding on Them's freezing weather, and they'd have to
keep constantly chipping the ice off of the boat because
the ice would weigh the boat down and start to
make it sink um. And you know, this is a
this is like a multi week journey. And at one point,
while Shackleton was at the tiller of the boat, uh so,

(16:16):
there had been very bad weather, of course, and then
he's at the tiller one time and he thinks he
sees the clouds breaking and a clear sky up ahead.
And then I want to quote from Shackleton's own account, quote,
I called to the other men that the sky was clearing.
And then a moment later I realized that what I
had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but
the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty six

(16:40):
years experience of the ocean, in all its moods, I
had not encountered a wave of so gigantic. It was
a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart
from the big, white capped seas that had been our
tireless enemies. For many days, I shouted, for God's sake,
hold on, it's got us. Then came a moment of
suspense that seemed drawn out into hours. White surge the

(17:03):
foam of the breaking sea around us. We felt our
boat lifted and flung forward like a cork and breaking surf.
We were in a seething chaos of tortured water, but
somehow the boat lived through it, half full of water,
sagging to the dead weight and shuddering under the blow.
We bailed with the energy of men fighting for life,
flinging the water over the sides, with every receptacle that

(17:26):
came to our hands, and after ten minutes of uncertainty,
we felt the boat renew her life beneath us. So
the fact that this giant wave did not sink or
just completely smash their tiny boat to pieces is one
of the many bizarre miracles of this unbelievable journey. Uh.
You know, you always have to wonder, like how things
like that happened, But apparently it did according to Shackleton's telling,

(17:49):
and the crew actually did manage to reach South Georgia.
According to an account by Gary Pearson, though after they
got ashore, in South Georgia. Quote at two am on
the first night ashore, Shackleton Oak, everyone shouting, look out boys,
hold on, it's going to break on us. It was
a nightmare. Shackleton thought that the black snow crested cliff

(18:09):
above them was a giant wave. Yeah. That that is
an impressive telling. And but yet at the same time,
you can easily go either way on it. Right, you
can say, well, all right, Shackleton is a trustworthy source
of information and this is what he saw. But then
on the other hand, we have to say he was
in an extreme situation. I mean, we've spoken before in
the show about how extreme conditionings can lead to seemingly

(18:33):
paranormal encounters. You know, if you've been awake for a
long time, if you're fighting for your survival, etcetera. And
all of those elements are are here. Yeah, and there
are problems with the plausibility of the story. I mean,
how did this wave not sink and kill them? Yeah,
So whatever happened obviously made an impression. Like this consummate
survivor had nightmares not of sea monsters in the deep,

(18:54):
but of a lone killer wave rolling up out of
the ocean as high as a mountain side. Uh. And
so one thing about giant waves like this is that
if they exist, we shouldn't have necessarily expected to hear
eyewitness accounts of them all that often in history because
of a couple of things. Number one, of course, if
they do exist, for a long time people thought them

(19:14):
to be very rare. But on top of that, if
sailors in the wooden ships of olden days encountered a
wave like this, uh, there was not a good chance
of them living to tell about it. Right. The goliath
wave would just arise, suddenly, kill everyone, sink the ship,
and then melt back into the sea without a trace.
How would you how would you even know it had happened. Yeah,

(19:35):
it would be like asking for eyewitness accounts of the
Grim Reaper. Yeah, because if if, if the reapers showing up,
But then it's probably doing its job. Yeah. But the
of course, Uh, Shackleton's story is not the only one.
There actually were a lot of stories like this. Many
mariners told these tales of a giant killer wave. In
the book Oceanography in the Days of Sale by Ian

(19:57):
Jones and Joyce Jones, the author is right about the
French naval explorer and scientists Dumont d'Urville and his his
disputes with the French scientists Francois Arago about the upper
limits of wave height quote when the astrolabe and that
was Derville ship. When the astrolabe in eighteen twenty six
was making its way across the southern stretches of the

(20:18):
Indian Ocean, it encountered a gale with mountainous seas in
which a man was lost overboard. Dumont d'Urville, in his narrative,
expressed the opinion that the waves reached a height of
at least eighty to a hundred feet in an era
when opinions were being expressed that no wave would exceed
thirty feet. Dumont d'urville's estimations were received, it seemed, with

(20:39):
some skepticism and France, while Arago rejected and even ridiculed
Derville's claim. Basically, you know this is just a semen's fancy. Uh.
He referred in writing to the quote truly prodigious waves
with which the lively imagination of certain navigators delights in
covering the seas. That sounded like a burn. That was
a bit of a burn. I think Yeah, I think

(21:00):
he was being a bit dismissive here, but maybe we
should take a break and then we come back. We
can talk about some physical evidence that actually points to
the existence of waves like this. Thank alright, we're back.
We've we've discussed accounts anecdotal evidence of giant waves, of
freak waves, of rogue waves. But now we're going to

(21:23):
get into what the science has to say. What what
kind of proof is there, if any, to substantiate these claims, Right,
you'd want some kind of physical evidence other than just
people saying they saw a giant wave, because people say
they saw all sorts of things. But uh, you know, ultimately,
this is why we have science. This is why we
have a recording equipment. This is so we can actually

(21:44):
validate that that waves of this nature exists. Yeah, and
so we talked about the French scientists France while Rago
being severely doubting that waves like this existed. And from
a scientific point of view, there had long been reason
to doubt these accounts of gigantic monster or waves. Not
that it was impossible for a giant wave to exist,
but that monstrous waves of the kind reported by mariners,

(22:06):
you know, the kind that would cause some of the
damage attributed to them. They were thought to only come
about on the scale of maybe once in hundreds or
thousands of years. You know, it's like the thousand year
storm kind of thing. So like every thousand years a
wave like this might occur, but then then just might
not be people around to see it. Yeah, exactly. So
you know, you've got this question where Shackleton and all

(22:26):
these others exaggerating, hallucinating misremembering was this the was the
mountain that flows like a mermaid or something. So I mean,
on one hand, you have that argument, right that maybe
they're just not occurring enough for anyone to ever see them.
So it doesn't seem right that we have numerous accounts
um where where people say they witnessed them. But of
course we also have to consider that, you know the

(22:47):
fact that ships and seamen again have always gone missing
like this. You look to the uh, the sheer number
of shipwrecks, you look to accounts of human activities on
the sea. Ships have always sunctions, have always encountered bad
weather or various other uh, you know, things that would
cause them to perish. Yeah, and another thing we should

(23:09):
think about is that ships sink and disappear at a
rate that would absolutely set our hair on fire if
it was like airplanes or something. You know, if there's
like one major airline crash, people freak out, but ships
go missing or sink all the time. Yeah, I was
looking around for some stats on this and today and again,
as humans command the sea more than ever before, more

(23:31):
ships are on the sea than than at any point
in human history, and we're looking at a loss of
something like a hundred large vessels every year. Yeah, it's
about an average. Yeah, Yeah, I've seen it all since.
The stat also thrown out there that it basically amounts
to two vessels per week, and that's just large vessels.
When you add in smaller vessels, it's even more. Yeah.
And now, and of course, some of these are gonna

(23:51):
be clear cases right where they say, oh, you know
this was the ships sunk because you know, it ran
aground here, some sort of a collision here, etcetera. But
in other cases it could inevitably remain a mystery. Is
just you know, a case by case scenario. So we
have to ask these cases of the mysterious cases, uh,
the very sort of case that may have led to
various nautical superstitions like the Bermuda triangle. Uh and then

(24:14):
an olden times sea monsters. Could these be due to
some manner of rogue wave? Yeah, exactly. And so to
answer that question, I think one good thing, just one
good place to start, and where people did look for
a long time was for physical evidence of damage caused
by rogue waves. Yeah and uh. And for the longest

(24:35):
we simply didn't have any solid evidence and we didn't
have any evidence of them, a solid evidence of them occurring.
We didn't have footage or anything. Uh. So all we
still had were just those, um those various bits of
anecdotal and from anecdotal evidence and then experts weighing in
on what seemed possible and likely. But of course, if
waves like this were occurring, they should in some ways

(24:57):
cause damage that we should be able to see and
detect act because, I mean, what water is amazingly powerful. People,
we do not have good intuitions about the physical power
of moving water. Uh. This may come from our experience,
like swimming for pleasure or splashing in a bathtub. You know,
we're moving water just glides gently and gracefully around the body,

(25:17):
causing no harm at all. But our intuitions about water
really fail when we encounter large masses of fast moving fluids.
Like the way people behave in flash floods is a
great example of this. You will a lot of times
see people who appear to think they can just wade
through knee high moving floodwaters, only to discover tragically that

(25:38):
it just washes you away instantly, or in any case
they think they can drive through. Oh yeah, and and
it's tragic, but it it's It reflects the fact that
our intuitions about the power of moving water are not good.
We underestimate it. Likewise with giant waves. You know, we
may be used to playing in the surf on a
beach vacation or something where the waves are harmless. They're fun,

(25:58):
you can glide with pleasure or over each peak and trough.
But sufficiently huge walls of moving water that are moving
fast can act more or less like huge walls of
concrete smashing right into you at speed, just like tsunamis
can you know, tear down solid buildings and trees. A
giant wave of crashing into a ship or a structure
can cause devastating physical damage. It hits, it moves, it

(26:21):
twists the structure. I mean it, it's like a hand
of a god indeed, and besides a heavy hitter. Yeah.
So if you ask, was there ever physical damage that
would indicate the existence of seemingly impossible rogue waves, like
before we had direct records of one, I think the
answer is yes, there were. There were some very chilling
and mysterious clues left in the wreckage of battered ships

(26:44):
and structures in or near the water. Uh. There there
are stories going way back to like waves crashing against
lighthouses that that are so far up off the water
it seems impossible that like a wave could have damaged them.
You know, lighthouses more than a hundred feet up off
the normal waterline, with windows smashed out and stuff like that,

(27:04):
and you'd be like, how did that happen? In N two,
the mobile offshore drilling platform, the Ocean Ranger, was apparently
damaged by a giant wave off the coast of Canada.
Its sustained damage to its ballast control room, which only
could have happened if there was an extremely high wave,
and this led to a chain reaction of events that

(27:24):
caused the platform to sink and tragically all eighty four
crew members died. Everyone aboard died when this thing sank.
But there were also there there have been stories all
throughout the twentieth century of like ocean liners about you know,
passenger vessels and cargo vessels and naval vessels that would
report being suddenly hit by a giant wave that the
just ricked havoc upon the ship. You know, it would

(27:46):
damage the bridge, it would rip off the mast and rigging.
Sometimes it would rip away lifeboats that were like you know,
had steel bolts holding them in place. Things that wouldn't
make sense if it was just rocking in normal bad weather.
But even with all this physical evidence of of structures
and ships being hit by these powerful events, it will
still be hard to meassure and confirm the existence of

(28:09):
these giant rogue waves firsthand, because number one, you can't
predict in advance when one will appear, Like there are
obviously better places and times to look for them, but
you can't know when one's going to happen or where.
And then if when one does show up, you suddenly
have a number of priorities, yeah, exactly ahead of perhaps
recording it. And that being said, we are increasingly in

(28:31):
an age of just ubiquitous recording equipment. So who knows
what the very near future will bring. Yeah, and so
when one does appear that there's generally not time to
react and track and observe it, like you're saying, it's
just there, and then within a few seconds you will
very possibly be dead. So the key here really is
to to not, of course, not just depend on eyewitness accounts,

(28:51):
which we already had, and of course there's an inherent
problem there, uh, and we can't go looking for them,
uh per se because their difficulties there. What you need
are essentially machine recordings, passive detections, some sort of detection
system that that will say, it will tell you like
what what sort of wave activity is occurring near a

(29:12):
given vessel or a near a given offshore platform and
one that is lucky or unlucky enough to catch one
in the act. And so the history of rogue wave
of science I think really changed in nine right, because
that's when we finally did get this this sort of evidence.
So it was January one in the North Sea, uh,

(29:33):
the North Sea platform drop Ner, which is a gas platform.
This is built in nineteen eighty four and it consists
of seven risers and even today it's an important complex
in the Norwegian oil industry. So this would be situated
like in the North Sea between Norway and Scotland. Basically, yeah,
so what's your you know, this is like these are
rough seas. Yeah, But on this particular day, equipment aboard

(29:57):
the platform, namely a downward look laser recorded a monster
of a wave, so significant wave height in the area.
This is just like the average sort of wave height
that was occurring was already twelve meters or thirty nine
point thirty seven feet. Okay, so everything was already like really,
that's that sounds horrible. I would not I wouldn't want

(30:19):
to be anywhere near that. You know, you don't want
to take your James Carrot out on that, right. But then,
according to the data, a wave rolled in that was
twenty five point six meters high or a three point
nine feet Now, as is often the case, you you
might just hear a number and it might not mean
anything to you, but do your best to stop for

(30:42):
a second here and picture it. Yeah, we're talking a
seven story building of a wave and uh, and it's
coming at the platform and indeed the platform sustained Uh,
minor damage, luckily, but that damage was enough to to
verify the reality of the wave. So, in other words,
showing that this wasn't just a recording anomaly where you know,

(31:02):
the laser went wonky or something a seagull flew undwritten
or whatever would cause it to to to produce some
sort of an anomaly. Uh No, we also have the
physical damage to the structure to back up what happened. Yeah,
so they've got the they've got the accurate scientific reading
from this instrument, and they've got corroborating evidence. So it
wasn't just a freak measurement. It was in fact a

(31:24):
freak wave, a rogue wave. And so in the first
day of the new year, we entered an era in
which the rogue wave was no longer purely a myth.
It was a reality. And from there we enter the
decades of figuring out, well, what's the frequency, what's the cause,
and ultimately what is the risk. Yeah, now, so you

(31:47):
might ask the question, Okay, we've just been talking about
big waves, what is a rogue wave? Technically I think
I alluded to this earlier, but a rogue wave is
defined in relative terms, right, So it's a wave that's
greater than twice the size of all the other waves
in the same area at the same time. Uh. And yes,
a rogue waves do occur even in the context of

(32:08):
very powerful regular wave patterns. So even in places where
the waves are unusually high and choppy, you can get
these things that stand out that are more than twice
as tall as the other waves around them. Because again
this North Sea example, like, those were some pretty tall waves.
I mean, what are we talking earlier about, um in
about earlier experts thinking that like thirty feet was more

(32:29):
or less the limited. Yeah, that that was long believed
to be about where waves capped off at least in
the kind of conditions you'd expect every year. Right, and
so the the just the ambient wave height in the
in the area was already uh, in excess of that. Now,
I guess maybe we should talk about how rogue waves
exactly cause damage to ships, right, because there there are

(32:50):
multiple waves that being hit by this flowing mountain, this
giant wall of water can sink you and destroy you.
Of course, any time a ship is hit by a wave,
it's physical structure can just be directly damaged by like
the force of the impact and this is this is
especially relevant to the superstructure of a ship's superstructure is

(33:10):
what you call all that stuff that's sticking up off
the top of the hull, like the mast, the rigging,
the bridge, the lifeboats. It can all be smashed two
bits or ripped apart. And of course a lake's worth
of water is going to wash over the top of
the vessel. And if there's a wave for the vessel
to take this water on, it very well can do that.
So that's your first problem. And I think that's an

(33:32):
easy one to miss because again, like you said, we
we just we often don't think about just the sheer
punch of that water, especially when it is like a
fist the size of of of lake's worth of water. Yeah. Well,
just imagine you are standing in the bridge of the
ship and this wall of water comes across you. So
it washes over the hull, it washes over the deck,

(33:53):
and it smashes into the bridge. And what what very
well could happen there is if you know, if the
bridge is not in some significant way destroyed, it may
well smashed through all the windows and throw all that
glass at you and wash into the bridge. But so
if it hits a ship laterally, like hits a ship
on the side, the ship can be capsized to buy
a rogue wave, flipped over on its side or upside down,

(34:13):
which of course can lead to foundering. You don't want
your ship sideways, um if it gets If a ship
gets hit head on by a rogue wave, this can
also harm. It caused major problems. It can lead to
the bow or the stern or the ship being lifted
in an angle up out of the water. And if
it's a large ship, this can be really dangerous because Robert,
you remember that scene in Titanic, you know where the

(34:36):
ship starts sinking from the bow in and the stern
of the boat is lifted up at an angle in
the air. Shipholes are extremely heavy and they're not designed
to withstand sheer stresses on the hull of that immensity,
Like the structure can't support half of the way to
the ship hanging up in the air. So the Titanic,

(34:57):
of course kind of cracked like a celery stalk. I
think I was reading that. The main theory now is
that the crack started at the bottom at a week
point along the base of the ship, and then it
just cracked off, and then the bow sank, and then
the stern bobbed for a bit and then sank as well.
But of course giant waves can cause other large ships
to do the same. So if the wave washes over you,

(35:19):
you can end up with one end of the ship
sort of lifted poking up out of the water as
it comes out of this wave motion, and that stress
can crack or or otherwise significantly damaged the hull, which
of course again can make you sink. So there there
are a lot of ways that a giant wave can
mess you up. You just don't want them at all.
All Right, we're gonna take one more break. When we

(35:40):
come back, we're gonna discuss some of the causes for
rogue waves and also a very recent paper that explored
the question just how often are these occurring and how
powerful are they? All Right, we're back. So we're looking
at the question first of what causes rogue waves, and
this is not a fully settled question. I think that
there are some, uh some competing and not necessarily mutually

(36:03):
exclusive hypotheses here, right, So first let's go back to
the dropping or wave for a moment. According to the
European Center for Medium range weather forecasts, high resolution retrospective forecasts, forecasts,
I mean's going backwards in time retrocasts. UM. Quote suggests
that waves driven by a southward moving polar low interacted

(36:27):
with a substantial local wind generated wave system to produce
the conditions conducive to the observed large rogue wave. And
that's from work by Bitlow at all. Okay, so that's
saying that there are there were conflicting wave patterns that
that came together in a way that they think created
this massive wave. It was something about the way that

(36:48):
these two different patterns interacted when they when they crashed together. Right.
And you know, again storm systems, weather and the movement
to the ocean. These are complex systems that are often
difficult force to understand. I think we can all understand
the power of convergence, you know, when you have have
I mean, we see this is something that's understandable about whether, right,

(37:09):
we have two fronts coming together. Um, you know, we
realize that can be bad news. Um and uh, and
so it's seemingly we've had a similar situation here. Um,
there's two energetic systems coming together and it creates conditions
that are optimal for this extra large wave to rise
up out of the sea. And I'll talk more about
stuff like that in just a minute. They also point

(37:31):
to the work of cavalry at all from and they
point out that also that we shouldn't think of rogue
waves as ultrawere altra rare once a generation occurrences. Rather quote,
such waves are a regular part of large storms and
coming across them is just a matter of probability, depending
on the spatial and temporal scales considered. So the dropping

(37:51):
a wave was probably a result of these two crossing
low frequency wave systems, and it's it's, it's and it
may be more calm than we initially thought, especially with
fast moving storms. Yeah, so what exactly is like the
physical mechanism that causes them in these situations, Well, that's
still being investigated. But there do appear to be several

(38:12):
potential causes and explanations. Like I said, I think these
are not mutually exclusive, like some might explain some rogue
waves and others might explain others. According to the n
o A, A picks out a couple of main ones
that it identifies as as the primary candidates. One is
wave interference. So when you study the propagation of waves,
and this is not just waves in water. This is

(38:33):
waves of all kinds like electromagnetic radiation waves, sound waves,
waves through matter like like you see in water. When
you see these uh, when you look at the propagation
of these types of waves, you begin to see that
when patterns of waves come into contact with one another,
they create an interference pattern. And this means that waves can,

(38:54):
for example, sort of cancel each other out. This is
also known as destructive interference. You might have seen a
demonstration of this with like speakers. If you take like
sound speakers and you place them at just the perfect
distance apart away from you, the sound waves can actually
cancel each other out, and suddenly you're not hearing the
sound they're making anymore. But if you turn off one

(39:17):
of the speakers, then you can hear it again because
they're not canceling each other out anymore. So that's destructive interference.
When the peaks and the troughs are um are alternating
canceling each other out. But peaks and troughs can also
line up to multiply one another into giant waves, and
this is known as constructive interference. Ironically, it's the constructive

(39:39):
interference that is destructive to our stuff, our ships, and
our structures. Uh. So that's one thing, just the normal
kinds of wave wave interference patterns. Another thing sounds like
it taps into the explanation we were just discussing, and
that's the interaction of water currents with wave patterns created
by storms. Essentially, when the current is flowing one way

(40:00):
and storm winds are pushing surface waves the opposite way,
this can cause an interaction that shortens the frequency of waves,
and this sometimes leads to waves joining together and forming
these gigantic rogue waves. But there's one other major proposed
mechanism or proposed explanation I was reading about two. Uh,
and this is a hypothesis that deals with nonlinear effects.

(40:23):
So the details of this are far over my head,
but I'll do my best. Basically, some research shows that
you can actually predict the formation of rogue waves if
you model ocean waves with reference to to a nonlinear
version of the Shreddinger equation, which of course we normally
would use to model the behavior of objects at the
quantum scale, such as individual atoms. But the the interesting

(40:47):
thing about matter about objects at the quantum scale, like
atoms or electrons or photons. Is that in many ways
they seem to behave like waves. You know, that's one
of the great paradoxes of quantum mechanics, is well, how
can a particle behave like a wave pattern? But the
shredding your equation and it's highly predictive. It tells us yes,

(41:07):
they do in fact behave like a wave pattern, and
you need to model them like a wave pattern or
you can't predict what they're gonna do. So the shredding
your equation is is useful at modeling and predicting these
behavior of these wave patterns. But but also apparently the
non linear version of it is relevant to predicting the
behavior of waves at large scale, like waves in the ocean.

(41:29):
And the mathematical functions underlying this explanation, Like I said,
they're way over my head. But essentially it's a model
that shows how normal interacting wave patterns, just you know,
standard waves going back and forth in the ocean can
sometimes become unstable and result in one wave, one wave
peak leaching or sucking energy from the surrounding wave peaks,

(41:51):
reducing the surrounding waves, and this one wave becoming huge
in the process, so that that's another proposed explanation. So
where are we earlier or in our understanding of rogue waves.
That's probably the next logical question to get to, because
if we've discussed already, it's like we we've we we
haven't known for sure they exist for too terribly long,
and we're still we're still competing or multiple scenarios that

(42:16):
may explain how they're occurring. Well, I looked to a
two thousand nineteen research paper from the University of Southampton
in the UK, and basically what they did is they
looked at that they decided to take. Instead of like
a global look at the data, they tried to isolate it. Uh.
They looked to fifteen different buoys on the US West

(42:36):
then cboard, and they looked at a twenty year window,
So we're looking at ninety four through as being the
window of data that they were looking at isolated to
this this region. And uh, this study revealed the following. So,
first of all, rogue waves vary greatly depending on the
area of sea and the time period focused on the

(42:57):
first part of that I think makes sense because we
discussed it just needs to be twice as big as
the as the waves in the area. And also this
is very key. Across to the two decade windows studied,
instances of rogue waves fell slightly, while the size of
the individual waves increased. Okay, so there's less of them,
but they're more powerful when you do get them right.

(43:18):
Kind of a good news, bad day situation, right. Uh.
They also found found that you know, rogue waves are
more prevalent, prevalent and uh and severe in winter months,
and they're they're happening with increasing frequency within calmer background seas.
Oh that's interesting. Now we know from previous just first
of all, from anecdotes, you know, common sailor's knowledge, but

(43:40):
also I think from more recent research that there are
rogue wave hot spots in the world where there's particularly
dangerous sorts of interaction between ocean currents and weather. I know,
for example, one place that's believed to be a rogue
wave of hot spot is like the southern Cape of Africa.
You know, if you're you're going around the Cape of
Good Hope, it's long been understood as treacherous waters. Yeah,

(44:03):
but you know, it long believed to be a place
of bad weather, but also apparently a place of rogue waves,
So everyone's probably wondering, well, how often are these things occurring? Again,
there was once this idea that these were once in
a lifetime events that it was it was like seeing
a unicorn on the high seas. But it looks like
now we're talking many times per day in the global

(44:24):
ocean um and then you know, that's a ship. That's
a concern for ships at sea, not only you know,
the global shipping industry, but other vessels as well. H
A two thousand four study identified more than ten giant
waves above the twenty five meter or eighty two footmark
uh during a near three week window. Yeah, it's one

(44:46):
of those things that makes you thankful that the ocean
is big and we're not on most of it most
of the time. But there's a lot of us out
there and a lot of our stuff out there at
any given time. Also, again, yeah we're there. There's more
human activity on the oceans than every or before. Uh.
Just to give everyone a taste of just that the
shipping industry alone, because because the shipping industry is huge,
it's easy to take for granted, but it is how uh,

(45:09):
most of the goods make their way around the world.
They're not traveling by airplane, they're traveling via ships. Uh.
Quin I found some good stats on this from the
International Chamber of Shipping. So, first of all, the international
shipping industry is responsible for the carriage of around nine
of world trade, and a given ship shipping vessel, we're
talking of a two hundred million dollar investment. Like that's

(45:32):
the when when you see these ships that are laden
with shipping containers, Uh, that's a two hundred million dollar vessel.
You're probably looking at the operation of merchant ships generates
an estimated annual income of over half a trillion US
dollars and freight rates. They're over fifty thousand merchant ships
trading internationally, transporting every kind of cargo. And the world
fleet and shipping is it's in over a hundred and

(45:55):
fifty nations and manned by over a million seafares of
virtually every nationality. So it's it's immense and there's more
of it than ever before. And then we have these
waves out there. Yeah, and so the idea that these
waves could be increasing in intensity or becoming more dangerous,
that's pretty scary because it doesn't just mean like it's

(46:18):
scarier for people who physically go out on the water.
Of course, it certainly is, but it also represents a
threat to UH, to the world economy, you know, the
economics of goods moving back and forth. Um. And then
just some more data from this particular paper, the University
of Southampton paper UH, just considering the u s West Coast,
which was the focus of his study. They say that

(46:40):
here you have of total US containerized trade and that
this is the largest u AS gateway for container vessels. UH.
And even when ships are not sunk or capsized by
a wave like this, there's still the risk of rogue
wave induced collisions. So you know, that's another thing to consider.
If you have two boats that are near each other, uh,

(47:01):
and you have an enormous wave of disrupting the waters,
then there's a possibility that things could slam together, which
they're certainly not designed to do. Then, on top of that,
this is a region where there's just a high volume
of tanker, bolt carrier, roll on, roll off, passenger fishing ships, um.
You know, all focused around the ports in the region.
And then of course you have a fair amount of

(47:21):
activity just to service offshore structures in the oil and
gas industry. Coming back to in our examples with oil platforms.
Earlier rogue waves have also swept people out to sea
in California and Oregon and uh And then one other point,
the researchers indicated the global climate change isn't necessarily a
factor in all of this. Part of this is that

(47:44):
there's just a great deal of oscillation with with with
the size of these waves, and we're dealing with such
a complex system and we have only two decades of
rogue wave data to deal with here. But at the
same time, they don't seem to be ruling it out.
I mean cause of increasing energy, right, if the sea
levels arising in the oceans are getting warmer and you're

(48:04):
getting more intense weather patterns. Yeah, So basically they're not
saying it's not the cause. You're just saying we were
not presenting that with this data. Ultimately, they again only
two decades worth of data to go on here. I
was reading an interview from back in two thousand and
ten with the author Susan Casey, who wrote a book
that I read a few years ago and I absolutely loved.
It's sort of a half memoir, half science book about

(48:26):
the Fara Lawn Islands off the off sort of around
where San Francisco is um and and about great white sharks,
and that that book was called The Devil's Teeth. But
this interview was about another book she wrote, apparently a
book about giant waves called The Wave of published in
two thousand ten, And in the interview she talks about
how companies that right insurance policies for maritime voyages are

(48:48):
concerned about increasing risk, and part of this risk seems
to be concerned about rogue waves. She says, quote Lloyd's
of London. Of course, you know, big maritime insurer Lloyd's
of London. Is that really quite concerned about cruise ships?
One of the guys said to me, this is a
high concentration of risk. You've got five thousand people on
boats that are getting bigger and bigger, and they're going

(49:09):
into gnarly or and gnarly or places. They're all over Antarctica. Now.
For example, recently one of the hardier cruise ships got
hit by a hundred foot rogue wave and all of
its navigation equipment got knocked out and the windows got broken.
During another recent cruise in Antarctica, all all the people
ended up in the water, which isn't a good situation.
By the grace of God, there was another boat nearby.

(49:31):
Now we're talking about big picture risk here. I just
want to stress that we're not true more in this episode.
We're not attempting to scare you out of your next
oceanic voyage, cruise or anything of that nature. Though I
think if that were our goal, we could do a
very good job of it. But well, no, that is
not our goal. I mean, but yeah, there are obviously
um going to be huge risks to ocean ocean voyages

(49:56):
of all kinds, and one of the biggest impacts that
would be there would obviously be trade. I do think
it's interesting that there are still, uh such mysterious, unresolved
questions about the behavior of waves of waves in the ocean.
I mean, this seems like something that people have been
aware of for a very long time, been studying for
a very long time. But it's one of those kind

(50:17):
of chaotic and complex things that maybe we don't often
stop to to appreciate the mystery and majesty of what's
easy to just watch wave activity in the ocean, you know,
said on the beach or on the deck of a
ship and watch the waves, and it's calming, and it's
it's rhythmic. There seems to be a I mean, there
is an order to it, but it seems to there
seems to be an order that we can grasp, that

(50:40):
we can that we can understand from a human perspective.
And of course, really it's it's ultimately more the domain
of of increasingly complex um computer simulation programs, if not
the machinations of some sort of vengeful sea God. Well,
I think one of the reasons we're so tempted to
wish to think of the waves as regular as because

(51:02):
we can listen to them is because it's auditory. Because
it's auditory information instead of just being visual information. It
assumes a kind of background rhythm whenever we're by the ocean,
or we hear something recorded by the ocean, or we're
on the ocean. Uh, you know, the the wave activity
becomes the steady, reliable percussion of our lives. And then

(51:22):
the idea that one of these waves could suddenly reach
out and be not like the others, be this angry
hand of God feels like a violation of what nature
has asked us to expect. Yeah, the white noise app
that I used to sleep every night. Never gives me
a rogue way. This is always just consistent calming oceanic activity.
You know what if it just suddenly screamed your name?

(51:44):
All right, well there you have it. You know, as
as we've mentioned before, you know, we were both landsmen here,
so we would love to hear from the sea folk
out there. Uh. If you have any anything to add
on this, have you encountered uh sizeable waves or even
if you have, you witnessed or seeing the handiwork of
something that could be classified as a rogue wave, we
would love to hear from you. Absolutely. Ye. Please get

(52:07):
in touch. In the meantime. If you want to listen
to this episode or more episodes of Stuff to Blow
your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your
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(52:29):
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(52:50):
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Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer,

(53:12):
Tor Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
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say hello, tell us about rogue waves, tell us about
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(53:41):
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