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.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick, and I want to 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,

(00:25):
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
off Kanagawa, and it's a nineteenth century Edo period would
block print by Katsushika Hokosai, and it depicts a great

(00:48):
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 row wave. UM. Now,
the the artist here, he explored the subject matter many
times in his career, so if you look at other
images he created, there are plenty of other waves, but

(01:11):
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
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

(01:32):
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
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,

(01:55):
the wave resembles the mountain in the background, and the
mountain in the backgrounds has sort of a blue gray
uh slope, and then the white peak of course covered
in snow. The waves are much like that with these
uh the white surging foam at the top. But in
the painting, the foam has these like hooks that almost
looked like eagles talents reaching out of the top of

(02:16):
this wall of water, and there's there's a way that
I at least often looked to this painting without even
realizing they were supposed to be boats represented at the bottom. Yeah,
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

(02:40):
of like serene nature, which is hilarious because it's depicting
a scene of utter chaos and destruction and terror. Right.
I mean, it's spoken like a true landsman, right when
clearly like this is a product of 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.

(03:03):
Pun intended with you is that when I've seen the
image in the past, it was just always like, ah, yeah,
serene nature. But no, this is a cresting mountain of
oceanic destruction, or at least potential destruction, uh, in terms
of human activities on or near the ocean. The mountain
that flows. So speaking of the dangers of the ocean.

(03:25):
I mean, there are many of them, and we know
what many 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
a gaze, or giant sea monsters that suck entire ships

(03:47):
into their mouths, and they can be funny to read
about now, especially 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 rational thing for them

(04:07):
to assume. And there are a few reasons for this.
We've touched 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

(04:28):
into a standard evolutionary taxonomy. We think of them as
animals that have common origins with the other animals. But
when ancient sailors told stories of these giant beasts out
in the ocean, many 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

(04:49):
dealing with it with just a culture and a legacy
um of of danger upon the sea and beneath the sea. Yes,
so there were those two things come together. I mean
here there'd be right exactly. And because the sea, you know,
a life at sea has long I think been associated
with a kind of with a kind of daring and bravado. Right.

(05:11):
But also I think there's another reason it was sort
of rational to believe in giant krakens that could pull
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,

(05:31):
leaving behind no trace at all. Other times you might
find a giant, sturdy ship wrecked with no apparent cause,
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

(05:52):
we've talked about on the show before, Alfred Lord Tennyson's
The Kraken, where you know, there's this beast battening upon
huge sea worms in his sleep deep 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 it's 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

(06:14):
causing them to vanish without a trace. They can hit rocks,
they can hit hidden reefs, they can capsize and take
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.

(06:36):
And it's what you mentioned about the woodblock painting earlier.
The monster wave, the rogue wave, also known as a
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, circus music. No, I

(06:57):
you know, I say that, but I bet that's actually
as honor us somewhere. Probably at this point all sub
genres exist. But so, yeah, the the idea of a
rogue wave or a monster wave, so we're not just
talking about rough seas in general, but a single gigantic wave,
an unbelievably high wall of water that appears as if
out of nowhere and crashes over your ship like a

(07:20):
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?
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,

(07:42):
more accounts from say ancient histories of of giant waves
as opposed to organic sea monsters. And I'm not saying
they don't exist. They may very well exist, but I
had trouble finding them, and we were discussing whine that
might be. I mean, you could go back to what
you said earlier, how a ship just piers at sea,
perhaps caused by a giant wave, and the story is

(08:03):
about a sea monster, or it becomes about an organic
sea monster. Yes. Uh. And one point of parallel here
is that obviously even the ancient people's knew about the
idea that the ship could encounter, say, bad weather while
it was out at sea and be wrecked 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

(08:25):
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 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 m
above all the others, much like the mountain of a
wave in the print we were discussing at the top

(08:47):
of the episode. Now, obviously, lots of ships in history
of encountered rough seas, 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 to
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 amount strong to

(09:07):
withstand it. Right, Like, if you know you're going around
the cape, you're gonna 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

(09:29):
twice as high as all the other waves. In the sea.
And of course when you're 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

(09:50):
talking about true rogue waves or monster waves, freak waves, etcetera. Here, Uh,
that do seem to come out of nowhere, and they're
not to be confused with giant waves generate aated by
seismic activity like underwater volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or cascades. That
though those can be incredible and I mean, just for
an example, um, I was reading about the earthquake generated

(10:12):
tsunami in Alaska's LaToya Bay, which, according to Discover magazine,
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

(10:33):
of Alaska Fairbanks. Quote. The earthquake shook loose millions of
cubic yards of dirt and rocks from a forty degree
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

(10:55):
sheared and stripped the bark from thousands of trees, some
of them four feet in diameter, just clear cut the
land next to the bay. Yeah, and this occurred in
night again, but they see 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

(11:17):
generated waves in shallow coastal areas. Yeah, And of course,
so we've got tsunamis as well. Tsunamis happened 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,

(11:38):
that's when it becomes really destructive because that massive pressure
it rises up out of the water and it, you know,
keeps coming and flooding against the shore, taking whatever is
on the shore along with it. Yeah. And now, obviously
atmospheric conditions are complicated, as we've discussed on the show before.
The complex systems um a lot of forces conversion together.

(11:58):
It becomes very difficult to predict atmospheric conditions and weather
conditions increasingly far in the future. And of course we
have 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,

(12:19):
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 it
is seeming aly 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

(12:39):
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
these stories? Are they true? And so I thought maybe
we should look at a couple of firsthand accounts. You ready, Robert,
let's do it. Who's our first adventure? Well? I thought

(13:00):
we should turn to one firstand account from the Antarctic
explorer Ernest Shackleton, which came from the famous voyage of
the James cared. Now, this voyage was one part of
the overall survival journey after the failure of Shackleton's Antarctic
expedition in a ship called the Endurance that started in
nineteen fourteen. And this is an absolutely astounding survival story

(13:24):
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 the ship became trapped in
ice in the wet El Sea, and the ship eventually sank.
Of course, this was nineteen fourteen or fifteen. You're in

(13:45):
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 known as Elephant Island, from after
where the ship sank, and Shackleton reasoned that their only
hope of survival was seeking help and reinforcement from the

(14:08):
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 eight hundred miles or hundred kilometers away
over terrible seas, you know, the seas around Antarctica or
you know, there's their icy there's rough, bad weather. It's

(14:29):
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 sank. The best thing they had
to use was a twenty two foot or about six
and a half meter lifeboat called the James Cared, So
Shackleton and a few others that they left the rest
of the crew sheltered at Elephant Island and they set

(14:50):
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,
and they'd be soaked by all these horrible waves that
are pounding on them. It's freezing weather, and they'd have
to keep constantly chipping the ice off of the boat

(15:11):
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, 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

(15:33):
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 years experience of the ocean in all
its moods, I had not encountered a wave so gigantic.
It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing

(15:56):
quite apart from the big, white capped seas that had
been our tireless and me's 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 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

(16:18):
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 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

(16:41):
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, and the crew actually did manage
to reach South Georgia. According to an account by Jerry Pearson,
though after they got ashore in South Georgia, quote, at

(17:04):
two am on the first night ashore, Shackleton woke 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 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,

(17:25):
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 paranormal encounters. You know, if you've been awake for
a long time, if you're fighting for your survival, etcetera.

(17:46):
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 monsters in the deep, but
of a lone killer wave rolling up out of the
ocean as high as a mountain side. Uh. And so

(18:08):
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 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

(18:30):
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,
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

(18:52):
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 kill their wave.
In the book Oceanography in the Days of Sale by
Ian Jones and Joyce Jones, the authors write about the
French naval explorer and scientists Dumont d'Urville and his his
disputes with the French scientists Francois Arago about the upper

(19:15):
limits of wave height. Quote when the astrolabe and that
was Derville's ship. When the Astrolabe in eighteen twenty six
was making its way across the southern stretches of the
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

(19:35):
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
some skepticism and France, while Arago rejected and even ridiculed
Derville's claim. Basically, you know, this is just a seamen's fancy. Uh.
He referred in writing to the quote truly prodigious waves

(19:58):
with which the lively imagination of certain navigator's delights in
covering the seas. That sounded like a burn. That was
a bit of a burn. I think, yeah, I think
he was being a bit dismissive here. But maybe we
should take a break and then when we come back,
we can talk about some physical evidence that actually points
to the existence of waves like this. All right, we're back.

(20:20):
We've we've discussed accounts anecdotal evidence of giant waves, of
freak waves, of rogue waves. But now we're going to
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

(20:42):
they saw all sorts of things. But uh, you know,
ultimately though, this is why we have science. This is
why we have a recording equipment. This is so we
can actually validate that that waves of this nature exists. Yeah,
and so we talked about the French scientists France while
Rago being severe really doubting that waves like this existed.
And from a scientific point of view, there had long

(21:04):
been reason to doubt these accounts of gigantic monster waves,
not that it was impossible for a giant wave to exist,
but that monstrous waves of the kind reported by mariners,
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

(21:24):
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. We're Shackleton and all
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.

(21:46):
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
fact that ships and seamen again have always gone missing
like this. You look to the uh, the sheer number
of ship ACTU, you look to accounts of human activities
on the sea. Ships have always sunk. Ships have always

(22:07):
encountered bad weather or various other uh you know, things
that would cause them to perish. Yeah. And another thing
we should 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.

(22:27):
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 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.

(22:49):
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
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, et cetera.
But in other cases it could inevitably remain a mystery

(23:09):
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 and
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

(23:32):
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
we simply didn't have any solid evidence. Uh. 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

(23:53):
bits of anecdotal and from anecdotal evidence and then experts
weighing in on what seemed possible and like. But of course,
if waves like this were occurring, they should in some
ways cause damage that we should be able to see
and detect, because, I mean, what water is amazingly powerful. People,
we do not have good intuitions about the physical power

(24:14):
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,
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

(24:35):
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
it just washes you away instantly, or in any cases
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.

(24:57):
We underestimate it. Likewise, with giant wave, 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.
You can glide with pleasure 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

(25:19):
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
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

(25:41):
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
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

(26:01):
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 and stuff
like that, And you'd be like how did that happen?
In Nineto, the mobile offshore drilling platform, the Ocean Ranger,
was apparently damaged by a giant wave off the coast

(26:22):
of Canada. It 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 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

(26:42):
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 damage the bridge, it would rip off the
mast and rigging. Sometimes it would rip away lifeboats that
were like you know, had deal bolts holding them in place.
Things that wouldn't make sense if it was just rocking

(27:04):
in normal bad weather. But even with all this physical
evidence of structures and ships being hit by these powerful events,
it will still be hard to missure and confirm the
existence of 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,

(27:25):
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
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

(27:46):
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,
which we already had, and so 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,

(28:10):
passive detections to some sort of detection system that that
will say, it will tell you like what what sort
of wave activity is occurring near a given vessel or
a near a given offshore platform? Yeah, and one that
is lucky or unlucky enough to catch one in the act.
And so the history of rogue wave science I think
really changed in nine right, because that's when we finally

(28:33):
did get this this sort of evidence. So it was
January one in the North Sea, uh, 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

(28:54):
the North Sea between Norway and Scotland. Basically, yeah, so
what's your you know, this is like these are rough seas,
but on this particular day, equipment aboard the platform, namely
a downward looking laser recorded a monster of a wave,
so significant wave height in the area. This is just

(29:15):
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 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

(29:36):
meters high or eight three point nine feet. Now it,
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 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.

(29:57):
And indeed the platform sustained h minor damage, luckily, but
that damage was enough to to verify the reality of
the waves. So, in other words, showing that this wasn't
just a recording anomaly where you know, the laser went
wonky or something a seagull flew unwritten or whatever would
cause it to to to produce some sort of an anomaly.

(30:18):
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 freak wave, a
rogue wave. And so in really the first day of
the new year, we entered an era in which the

(30:40):
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 might
ask the question, Okay, we've just been talking about big waves.
What is a rogue wave? Technically I think alluded to

(31:00):
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, so rogue waves do
occur even in the context of very powerful regular wave patterns.
So even in places where the waves are unusually high

(31:20):
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, weren't we
talking earlier about um in about earlier experts thinking that
like thirty feet was more or less the limit. Yeah,
that that was long believed to be about where waves
capped off, at least in the kind of conditions you'd

(31:42):
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 multiple waves that being hit by
this flowing mountain, this giant wall of water can sink

(32:02):
you and destroy you. Of course, anytime a ship is
hit by a giant wave, its 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. Superstructure is what you call all that
stuff that's sticking up off the top of the hull,
like the mast, the rigging, the bridge, the lifeboat's uh,

(32:25):
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 way 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 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

(32:46):
it is like a fist the size of a lay
of of lakes 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, 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 smash

(33:07):
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, 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

(33:30):
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 ship starts sinking
from the bow wind and the stern of the boat
is lifted up at an angle in the air. Ship

(33:51):
holes 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, of course
kind of cracked like a celery stalk. We we I
think I was reading that. The main theory now is
that the crack started at the bottom at a weak

(34:12):
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,
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

(34:34):
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
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

(34:56):
powerful are they? Thank thank all, 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 exclusive hypotheses here, right, So first let's go back
to the dropping or wave for a moment. According to

(35:17):
the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts high resolution
retrospective forecast forecasts that he's going backwards in time retrocasts
um quote suggests that waves driven by a southward moving
polar low interacted with a substantial local wind generated wave
system to produce the conditions conducive to the observed large

(35:40):
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 these two different patterns interacted when they when
they crashed together. Right. And you know, again, storm systems,

(36:02):
weather and the movements of the ocean. These are complex
systems that are often difficult for us to understand. But
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, we have
two fronts coming together. Um, you know, we realize that
that can be bad news. Um and uh, and so

(36:22):
it 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 to
the work of cavalry at all from six and they

(36:42):
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
your wave was probably a result of these two crossing
low frequency wave systems, and it's it's, it's and it

(37:06):
may be more common 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
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

(37:28):
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
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

(37:51):
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,
for example, sort of cancel each other out. This is
also known as destructive interference. Uh. You might have seen
a demonstration of this with like speakers. If you take
like sound speakers and you place them at just the

(38:13):
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 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 tropics are um
are alternating canceling each other out. But peaks and tropics

(38:37):
can also line up to multiply one another into giant waves,
and this is known as constructive interference. Ironically, it's the
constructive 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,

(38:59):
and is the interaction of water currents with wave patterns
created by storms. Essentially, when the current is flowing one
way 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

(39:23):
mechanism or proposed explanation I was reading about two uh,
and this is a hypothesis that deals with nonlinear effects
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

(39:44):
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
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

(40:07):
can a particle behave like a wave pattern? But the
Shreddinger equation, and it's highly predictive, it tells us yes,
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

(40:29):
non linear version of it is relevant to predicting the
behavior of waves at large scale, like waves in the
ocean 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

(40:53):
peak leaching or sucking energy from the surrounding wave peaks,
reducing the surrounding waves and this one wave of becoming
huge in the process. So that that's another proposed explanation.
So where are we currently are 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

(41:14):
we haven't known for sure they exist for too terribly
long and we're still we're still competing or multiple scenarios
that 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

(41:35):
like a global look at the data, they tried to
isolate it. Uh. They looked to fifteen different buoys on
the US Western 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

(41:57):
the following. So, first of all, rogue waves vary greatly
depending on the area of sea and the time period
focused on the first part of that I think makes
sense because we discuss 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

(42:18):
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. Kind of a good news bad news 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 of frequency within calmer

(42:39):
background seas. Oh that's interesting. Now we know from previous
just first of all, from anecdotes, you know, common sailors knowledge,
but also I think for 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 you have to

(43:00):
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, 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

(43:21):
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 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. A two thousand four study

(43:41):
identified more than ten giant waves above the twenty five
meter or eighty two footmark during a mere three week window.
It's one 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

(44:01):
there at any given time. Also, again, yeah we're there.
There's more human activity on the oceans than ever 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 most of the goods make their way around the world.
They're not traveling by airplane, they're traveling via ships. Uh.

(44:22):
Coin 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 ships shipping vessel, we're
talking of a two hundred million dollar investment. Like that's
the when when you see these ships that are laden
with shipping containers, Uh, that's a two hundred million dollar vessel.

(44:44):
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
fifty nations and manned by over a million seafarers of

(45:06):
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
scarier for people who physically go out on the water.

(45:27):
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
here you have of total US containerized trade and that

(45:51):
this is the largest u AS gateway for container vessels.
And even when ships are not sunk or capsized by
a wave like this, there's a 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, and you have an enormous wave disrupting
the waters, then there's a possibility that things could uh

(46:12):
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 activity just to service
offshore structures in the oil and gas industry. Coming back

(46:33):
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. Um. Part of this is that there's
just a great deal of oscillation with the with with

(46:54):
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. You. But at the
same time, they don't seem to be ruling it out. Yeah,
I mean because of increasing energy, right if the sea
levels arising in the oceans are getting warmer and you're
getting more intense weather patterns. Yeah, So basically they're not

(47:15):
saying it's not the cause. They'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
the Fara Lawn islands off the off sort of around

(47:36):
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, published in two
thousand ten, And in the interview she talks about how
companies that write insurance policies for maritime voyages are concerned
about increasing risk, and part of this risk seems to

(47:58):
be concerned about rogue waves. She says, quote Lloyd's of London.
Of course, you know, big maritime insurer Lloyd's of London
is actually 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 into gnarly or and
gnarly or places. They're all over Antarctica now. For example,

(48:21):
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. Now
we're talking about big picture risk here. I just want
to stress that we're not trure more in this episode.

(48:43):
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
of all kinds, and one of the biggest impacts that

(49:05):
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
of chaotic and complex things that maybe we don't often

(49:27):
stop to to appreciate the mystery and majesty of what's
easy to just watch wave activity in the ocean, I said,
on the beach or on the deck of a ship,
and 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
we can that we can understand from a human perspective,

(49:50):
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
we can listen to them is because it's auditory. Because

(50:11):
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 wave of activity
becomes the the steady, reliable percussion of our lives. And
then the idea that one of these waves could suddenly

(50:31):
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. What if it just suddenly screamed your name?
All right, Well, there you have it, you know, as

(50:53):
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. Yeah, please get

(51:14):
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
mind dot com. That's where you'll find the landing page
for this episode. Uh, and that also features the the
artwork the great Wave off kind of God what. You
can see this image in case you you're not sure
you've seen it before, and if you want to interact
with other listeners, be sure to head on over to

(51:36):
the discussion module. It's called Stuff to Blow your Mind
discussion Module. It is a Facebook group, uh it is.
It's a pretty decent place as far as social media goes. Uh.
One of my more one of my few preferred social
media destinations these days. Literally the only reason I still
have a Facebook account, So make it your reason as well,
and as always too if you want to. If you

(51:57):
want to support our show, you know you can buy
and merchandise through our T shirt store. That's always appreciated.
But the best thing you can do is just rate
and review the show wherever you have the power to
do so, and tell a friend if an episode really
resonated with you, share it with someone else. I mean, really,
that's the That's the bread and butter of this show's appeal.
Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer,

(52:19):
Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback about this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello. Tell us about rogue waves, tell us about
waves in general, tell us your stories of the high seas.
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(52:48):
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts from my heart Radio is at the heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
that the foot po