Anyone who has spent extensive amounts of time at sea, particularly in the higher latitudes, will tell you that rogue waves do indeed exist but until recently the rare phenomenon has not been given a clear scientific explanation and was largely relegated to myth.
It seems hard to fathom but the first rogue wave to ever be scientifically measured was along the Norwegian coast in 1995. The Draupner wave, as it was called, was a true beast. In gale conditions with swells running at up to 40 feet, the Draupner wave stood an amazing 84 feet tall.
“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” Francesco Fedele said in a statement. Fedele is an associate professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and lead author of a new paper detailing how rogue waves are created. “They always talked about these waves that appear suddenly and are very large – but for a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”
To search for a scientific explanation for such a wave, researchers collected data from an 18-year-period that recorded 27,500 reported rogue waves. What the data showed them was that rogue waves are not created by some strange, mythic force. Instead, they are the creation of the right combination of circumstances coming together at the same time.
In crossing seas, waves of different sizes and velocities, have a tendency to combine into one larger wave for a period of time. If you have enough of these cross-sea combinations and strong enough winds, the possibility of several merging into a giant wave goes up.
As it turns out, “Rogue waves are, simply, a bad day at sea,” Fedele concluded. “They are extreme events, but they’re part of the ocean’s language. We’re just finally learning how to listen.”
