Ship-Sinking Monster Waves Revealed

vinlud writes "Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins. ESA writes about it in a story. More information about this phenomena at the website of Karsten Trulsen, Associate Professor at the University of Oslo."

Comments

Clive Cussler...

[mcSey921]

Used a rogue wave in one of his stories (they all run together not sure which one). It's also a leading theory behind the disapearance of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Re:Clive Cussler...

[Ayaress]

I live in Michigan, and used to go out on Lake Superior all the time on vacations. It doesn't have these sorts of waves. I've never seen anything over four feet, and that was in a thunderstorm. I've heard of ten and fifteen foot waves during Nor'Easter storms. It does, however, have monster storms, especially in the winter. The Great Lakes, espeically Huron and Superior, have more shipwrecks per water area than the Bermuda Triangle thanks to the Nor'Easters. The Nor'Easter of 1913 alone sank 16 large ships, with combined crews of 1300.

Only 30m?

[jacoberrol]

Bah... Only 30m? That's nothing compared to the Mega Tsunami!

Re:Only 30m?

[Ayaress]

The difference is that Tsunami aren't very big on the open ocean. They barely rock a midsized yacht in deep water, let alone sink a large freigher. They only kick up when they get into shallow water.

I'm surprised this is news

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

There's been credible reports of these for years. In "Silent Spring" Racheal Carlson mentioned a something like 125 foot wave that had been observed by reliable observers and measured against the mast of a ship.

Re:I'm surprised this is news

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how reliable can be observers while they are shitting in their pants.

Re:I'm surprised this is news

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Wouldn't the shat pants in themselves be a reliable indication of the event?

Re:I'm surprised this is news

[DillPickle]

My best friend is retired from Esso Tanker Service, and he swears that one clear day they were underway from Valdize, AK, to Southern California, with a full load of crude oil. He was the helmsman, and on his watch in broad daylite, he observed what he thought was a fog bank approaching head-on to their course. He informed the Captain and they both watched in amazement when the "fog bank" turned out to be a huge wave. He swears that when the wave struck the ship, green water engulfed the wheel-house. He and the skipper had no reason to expect such a wave. I don't remember the height from the water to the wheel-house was, but there was only one wave, and Herb says if they had been hit at an angle, they would have sunk without a trace.The rest of the crew was below deck, or there would have been a real disaster. As it were, the ship only suffered minor damage.

Small swells can make a surfaced submarine dive

[whoda]

In the past, there were a few incidents of US Navy submarines spontaneously diving while doing surface transits near the mouth of the San Francisco bay.

There were no deaths, but a few people in various instances got hurt. I recall one person suffering very serious injuries when the submarine went down over 100 feet pretty much instantly.

The cause was finally determined to be that the period of the swells near the Golden Gate bridge caused the distance between the swells to be just less than the submarines total length.

The wave swells would lift the sub up, and then 'drop' the sub as it passed over the wave. Inertia would keep the sub 'dropping' and an un-intentional dive occured.
Since they were rigged for surface operations, they quickly popped back up to the surface.

We had revised operating procedures for transiting near San Francisco after this was discovered.
However, newer submarines are larger, and the period of the swells doesn't match up as nicely with the dimensions of the sub, so it is less of a hazard than it used to be.

Run! It's Godzilla!

[fiftyvolts]

I only glanced at the story and thought "SHIP DESTROYING MONSTER! WTF"

I haven't been amused this much all day.

Google fodder

[MarsDefenseMinister]

This paragraph that I found on should provide enough information that with a little Google searching a wealth of maritime history and lore about big waves can be found:

A single rogue wave can wreak havoc on even the sturdiest vessels, and our maritime history is littered with the lore and legend of these sea monsters. In 1942, the Queen Mary was struck by a mountainous wave that rolled her over. Fortunately, the ship righted herself and continued on to England. In 1965, the U.S.S. Pittsburgh lost 90 feet of her bow to a rogue wave in the North Pacific. In 1966, while crossing from Lisbon to New York, the S.S. Michelangelo was stuck by an 80 foot wave that tore 30 feet of bulwark off, smashing it into the bridge and first class rooms. Every year, major ocean vessels suffer structural damage while traveling south along the standard route from the Middle East to the United States or Europe.

New Extreme Sport Prediction

[4of12]

Skiers I know have sometimes gone heli-skiing, getting the copter to drop them onto otherwise hard-to-access mountains with pristine deep powder.

There's probably some surfers that have Been There-Done That ® on Diamond Head in Hawaii that would pay for a chance to be dropped down onto a 25-meter wave.

If the ESA satellite data can be used to find the waves before they disappear, some dudes could be riding some truly radical waves.

bermuda triangle

[Lord Dreamshaper]

Can't remember the author or title, but I read a book that rather methodically debunked Bermuda Triangle stories (i.e. many didn't actually happen in the triangle, occurred in stormy weather, etc.) and found that unexplained disappearances were statistically similar to any other ocean area. These monster waves would go a long way to explaining many previously unexplained disppearances from any area of the ocean, especially the "spooky" way they disappear w/o so much as an SOS Or so the alien abductors would have us believe...

Superior 1, Fitz 0

[Spamalamadingdong]

Superior is a big lake, but I doubt that it is either big or deep enough to exhibit the kind of wave phenomena these researchers are investigating. Smaller waves piling up when they hit shallower water or coming from different directions (created by converging winds) would be sufficient to explain the sinking.

FWIW I was travelling recently and saw some posters which appeared to be made from underwater photos of the resting place of the Fitz. Sobering.

You shouldn't be

[Spamalamadingdong]

Chance sightings and measurements of these brief phenomena are one thing, a global census-by-sampling is quite another.

Other Space Technology Helps Save Lives

[rpiquepa]

Technology developed for space travel has been adapted for uses on Earth for a long time. But today, three articles report that some current customizations can save lives. For example, SPACE.com writes that space technology is entering hospitals. It says that a system originally intended to keep clean the space station Mir, and later the International Space Station (ISS), is now used in hospitals to build temporary 'clean rooms' -- virtually bacteria-free -- around patients. And a video infrared camera developed by NASA's JPL to study Earth is being modified into a brain scanning device searching for tumors. Elsewhere, National Geographic is saying that satellites are starting to aid earthquake predictions. And of course, these ESA satellites are identifying these 'rogue waves'. You need to read the articles mentioned above to realize how all these bleeding edge technologies can really help us on Earth, but if you have a limited time, please read this summary for selected excerpts and photos.

But no beach for spectators

[Engineer-Poet]

First, if those waves were moving that fast, they would not be so tall (tsunamis are only inches high as they cross the oceans). Second, the waves would not be dangerous to ships if they were not steep. Third, you could keep up with almost any wave if you used something like a hydrofoil board.

The real problems are that you have to take a boat or aircraft from wave to wave (IF you can forecast them well enough), there is no beach to camp on between waves and no vantage point for spectators. The high costs and difficulty of milking spectators for money makes it unlikely that a sport would develop.

Re:Why not near coasts?

[jerde]

How come these are never reported near coasts? At the frequency they were detected, you think there would be a tsunami event somewhere every week or so.

My understanding of them is that they aren't a single "wave" traveling along, carrying some large amount of energy. Instead, the appearance of a rogue wave is just a temporary concentration of the local wave energy into one spot.

It's a constructive interference effect, and doesn't last long or travel far. Longer waves move more quickly than shorter waves, so by chance you could get a few different waves that all catch up with each other and produce a temporary HUGE wave in one particular location. The individual waves then drift apart as they move at their different rates.

The whole controversy is the math that goes into predicting how common such a coincidence is. I do not actually understand the math involved, but my guess is there is some effect that makes it easier for the waves to line up with each other to cause the effect. (Sort of like a magnetic attraction -- as the waves pass each other, something helps the phases line up more than a simple linear combination would suggest)

There is an EXCELLENT animation(animated GIF, 1.7MB) on the Karsten Trulsen site linked to in the story here. It shows how intentionally lined-up waves of different frequencies will all catch up with each other to form a large local wave. It then also shows how that same sequence of waves can be placed in amidst "normal" ocean waves, and the same effect still appears. Very cool to watch.

A tsunami, on the other hand, IS a single, large-energy wave, and is a completely different phenomenon.

- Peter

Non-linear Schrodinger Equation

[div_B]

There was an excellent doco about this shown here in NZ several months ago. For years people have claimed that their vessel was mangled by a huge wave and have been scoffed at, the reason being that oceanographers have traditionally used a linear model to describe surface waves, which yields a gaussian(?) wave-height distribution, placing all wave heights close to the mean height, and rendering these gargantuan waves extremely improbable. Modelling surfaces waves with a variant of the non-linear schrodinger (aka gross-pitaevskii?) wave equation, which is used to describe many-body quantum systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates, shows that waves several times larger than the mean wave height will occur.

It seems to me that this is a classic case of people being morons and using simple models, and then refusing to believe that by using their crap approximation they may have missed something important. As Enrico Fermi said many years ago now, "Nowhere in the bible does it state that the laws of nature must be describable linearly!"

Perfect Storm

[bananahammock]

The book, Perfect Storm, described specific details leading up to the time the now infamous fishing trawler boat disappeared. It described these radio beacons tethered to the sea-bed (IIRC) that provided amongst other data, the height of waves as they passed underneath. One of the last pieces of info from one beacon during the big storm, was it registering a wave around 100 feet high. It was wrenched from its tether and vanished not long afterwards. Made for pretty compelling reading, not to mention how utterly frightening it must have been for those fisherman who died.