#Huge ocean waves windows

At sea, you might not even notice a tsunami wave rolling under you but near the shore, as it enters the shallows, those waves can climb to terrifying heights, often kilometres wide. Rogue waves are not tsunamis – those waves are triggered by a large displacement of water due to an event such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or landslide. When you got back on land, they’d just say you were dreaming.” “But back then there was no proof and it is hard to judge the exact size on the bridge of a ship. “I’ve seen some big, big waves,” he says. Credit:Karsten Petersen / Peter van Duyn also spent many years sailing the world: captaining ships, weathering hurricanes and cyclones and skirting icebergs, in the 1970s and ’80s – before rogue waves were accepted science. The photo was taken from the bridge 22 metres above sea level, which the wave then crashed on top of, leaving a twisted metal gangway above deck and wreckage below. The tanker Stolt Surf faces a huge wave in 1977. “No sky, no horizon, no ship in front of you – only water.” But “like a miracle”, the white mist cleared, and the tanker pressed on through the wild seas, although with heavy damage.

#Huge ocean waves windows

Looking out of the bridge windows was “like looking into a water tank,” he says. When the water crashed on deck, more than 22 metres above sea level, Petersen, now retired, recalls the heart-stopping moment they weren’t sure if the ship was underwater or still afloat. From the bridge, he managed to photograph it (below) – snapping some of the world’s few images of a rogue wave. In more than 40 years at sea, marine engineer Karsten Petersen says he never saw a more terrifying wave than the monster that crashed on deck during a voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Singapore to the US in 1977. Such phenomena can even swallow rescue helicopters as they swing down to the water. ANU theoretical physicist Professor Nail Akhmediev, who has been working to predict rogue waves through equations, says survivors will sometimes describe otherwise good sailing weather, “clear skies” before the monster wave appears. It can rise and disappear quickly out of a stormy sea, but it can come out of nowhere too – in calm waters. Today, the monster wave of sailors’ nightmares has a formal scientific definition: a rogue wave is at least twice as high as recent waves around it. So, what are rogue waves exactly? And are we getting any better at predicting (and outlasting) them?Ī cruise ship, reportedly in waters near Australia, was hit by steep wave so big the crew in the bridge fell as the ship plunged down the trough. Facing down that 1995 wave, the QE2 captain said it looked as if they were headed for Britain’s White Cliffs of Dover. That same year, when the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 was struck by a 27-metre tall wave en route from the UK to New York, scientists had to admit something else: these so-called rogue waves aren’t just possible, they happen relatively frequently. Then in 1995, a sensor on a Norwegian oil rig captured proof of what Dumont d’Urville had faced: a wave 26 metres tall, more than twice the size of any recorded in the area in the hours before – taller even than the hypothetical waves scientists then believed could only happen once every 10,000 years. For centuries, ships’ disappearances at sea were blamed on pirates or misadventure, and stories of giant waves dismissed as readily as legends of sea monsters.

As far as the scientists of the 19th century were concerned, what they’d seen was impossible: no wave could reach more than nine metres. Somehow, they made it back to shore, losing just one man on that dangerous crossing of the Indian Ocean in 1826.īut when Dumont d’Urville, known as France’s Captain Cook, and his crew later recounted the tale of the monster wave, no one believed them. On deck, explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville estimated the wave loomed at least 30 metres high – and it was bearing down on his ship the Astrolabe fast. It came out of the storm a sudden wall of water as tall as a 10-storey building. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size