[HN Gopher] Extreme 'rogue wave' in the North Pacific confirmed ...
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Extreme 'rogue wave' in the North Pacific confirmed as most extreme
on record
Author : gardenfelder
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-01-12 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| kldavis4 wrote:
| If you are interested in this topic, I recommend _The Wave_ by
| Susan Casey. She covers both rogue waves and big wave surfers.
| cossatot wrote:
| I thought this book was decent, and I don't know of any others
| better in the niche, but I wanted a bit more science than was
| presented. I think Casey got too intimidated by the scientists
| to really try to understand the models at all, and then spent
| too much time fawning over Laird Hamilton. But perhaps that was
| a decision made by the editors rather than by Casey navigating
| two very different groups of protagonists.
| kldavis4 wrote:
| Yeah, it was definitely not what I was expecting in terms of
| balance between the science and the surfing personalities. My
| impression was that she really lacked enough hard science
| material (that was sufficiently interesting given the
| audience). I will admit that in the end I was way more
| interested in the big wave surfing, a topic I really didn't
| appreciate before.
| danielodievich wrote:
| For those interested in this topic, The Wave by Susan Casey
| https://susancasey.com/books-list/the-wave is an entertaining
| read, alternating between accounts of surfers following the waves
| and history of various waves. Some science of various resonances
| and chaotic systems is discussed but all too briefly.
|
| The most interesting part of her documentary book for me was the
| fairly recent event of 1740 foot/~550 meter tall tsunami wave
| that generated by a mountain breaking and falling into the sea as
| result of serious earthquake in Alaska, and 1 (one) person who
| survived riding on it in his boat. Truly an epic wall of wate
| that was measured for us by the high watermark of the broken
| trees on the surrounding mountains.
| GalenErso wrote:
| I'm curious how the weather of the sea affects military naval
| operations.
|
| How can an aircraft carrier launch and recover planes if it's
| being rocked by waves?
|
| How can a destroyer launch missiles from vertical launch cells if
| waves are constantly crashing on the deck?
|
| I wonder how a Navy made up entirely of nuclear submarines would
| fare against a more diverse force with an equal number of hulls.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be stable.
| I've never been on the largest ones, but as a Marine I was on
| the Essex (a smaller carrier for jump jets and helicopters) and
| we sailed basically directly through a typhoon. The ship was
| pretty stable, pitching about 10 degrees from side to side.
| Enough to make some experienced sailors toss their lunch, and
| even if there was no wind, I think it would have been very
| treacherous to do flight ops with the deck pitching like that.
|
| For fixed wing jets that need to land on deck... even if you
| ignored the wind that goes along with these conditions, I think
| recovering aircraft would be too great a risk. That does bring
| up the wind and visibility that (almost always) goes along with
| these extreme sea states, which would be probably just as
| hazardous as the deck pitching about to flight ops.
|
| For basically everything else, I think the naval systems work
| just fine in bad weather.
|
| In regards to rogue waves, an 85 foot wave would put green
| water on the flight deck of the carrier I was on, something
| that would be difficult to imagine for me. Aircraft on the
| flight deck are chained down with multiple chains, each of the
| chains having the strength to hold the entire aircraft down, so
| I can't imagine losing aircraft, but flooding the planes with
| sea water probably wouldn't be good for them.
| TylerE wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra
|
| 3 destroyers sank, with almost 1000 lives lost, and virtually
| every ship in the fleet took enough damage to at least force
| a port visit, if not a major repair/refit.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Not positive how this got misconstrued, but I'm not saying
| an aircraft carrier is unsinkable. I'm saying it's designed
| not to pitch and roll as much as a say a destroyer or
| frigate. That's it.
| TylerE wrote:
| There were _carriers_ in the Typhoon rolling 70 degrees.
| worik wrote:
| > Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be
| stable
|
| The ocean is bigger.
|
| It is only a matter of time until one is lost
|
| The ocean is the boss of sailors, a loving but harsh
| mistress.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| There have been plenty of aircraft carriers sunk, not sure
| what your point is.
| whycome wrote:
| I'm curious how such a wave could be....intentionally created.
| [deleted]
| msisk6 wrote:
| That's actually a minor plot point in Neal Stephenson's
| latest novel "Termination Shock."
| bee_rider wrote:
| There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But I'm
| not sure how effective this sort of thing would be against a
| carrier. A single wave could I guess be spotted from pretty
| far away, and is just a problem for a plane that wants to
| land or takeoff at that very moment. Creating general chop in
| excess of what the carrier can handle might be annoying, but
| it seems much more difficult (lots of energy involved in
| creating a bunch of waves, and I guess this rules out using a
| single huge explosion).
|
| Plus, I bet somebody would work out who did it if a country
| used a nuke to create a wave, there are only a couple
| candidates for who could do this sort of thing, after all. I
| bet it would have pretty significant diplomatic ramifications
| to... inconvenience a carrier group for a couple minutes.
| Majromax wrote:
| > There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But
| I'm not sure how effective this sort of thing would be
| against a carrier.
|
| Not very effective.
|
| Tsunami waves move huge volumes of water, but in the open
| ocean they are also very _long_ waves. Their travel speed
| is about the same as the "linear long wave speed", or
| about sqrt(g*D) where D is the depth of the water.
|
| As these waves approach the shore, however, the ocean
| becomes more shallow. Waves slow down. The tsunami
| effectively "piles up" on itself, and a wave that was a
| little high and a lot long becomes a wave that's a lot high
| and a little long.
|
| A carrier operating away from shore would see the tsunami
| in its more benign state. Coastal cities, however, would be
| in trouble.
| worik wrote:
| There was an experimental, and secret, programme in WWII to
| attempt to generate tsunami as weapons In New Zealand
|
| I know very little more than that, but it was in the news
| here some years ago.
|
| I do know it was a failure, quite a comprehensive failure
| vkou wrote:
| Submarines won't do the coastal bombardment and air strikes and
| escort and reconnaissance work that regular navies are capable
| of.
| scrumper wrote:
| Well they do some of that: reconnaissance both electronic and
| visual, coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise
| missiles, and they can land very small groups of special
| forces too. Not to the extent surface ships can but if
| suddenly something made surface warfare impossible,
| submarines could take over a chunk of it. And you can imagine
| easily how drones might be embarked on a submarine and
| launched like cruise missiles.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise
| missiles_
|
| Submarine-launched missiles, in a diverse navy, can launch
| from underwater. That's great for stealth. It's terrible
| for budget. A submarine-only fleet would need to surface to
| economically attempt coastal bombardment and air defence.
|
| That said, I'm not sure what fraction of _e.g._ the U.S.
| Navy 's submarine missiles are capable of subsurface
| dispatchment.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I don't understand this article. It says at the beginning:
|
| ```
|
| In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a
| lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high
| (58 feet).
|
| The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February
| 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded.
|
| ```
|
| However, right below that, it says:
|
| ```
|
| It wasn't until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of
| the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly
| struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100
| miles) off the coast of Norway.
|
| ```
|
| New wave is 58 feet, wave in 1995 is 85 feet?
| mturmon wrote:
| It is indeed unclear.
|
| The resolution is that the absolute rogue-wave-height isn't the
| measure of extreme, it's the rogue-wave-height relative to the
| typical height. This is explained in TFA if you read carefully.
|
| > Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than _twice
| the height of the waves surrounding it_. The Draupner wave, for
| instance, was 25.6 meters tall, while its neighbors were only
| 12 meters tall.
|
| And of course this makes sense.
| kristjankalm wrote:
| as the article says, it's "most extreme" with respect to its
| size compared to the surrounding waves: "the Ucluelet wave was
| nearly three times the size of its peers."
| [deleted]
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| > the one that surfaced near Ucluelet, Vancouver Island was not
| the tallest, _its relative size compared to the waves around it
| was unprecedented._
|
| >Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than twice the
| height of the waves surrounding it. The Draupner wave, for
| instance, was 25.6 meters tall, while its neighbors were only
| 12 meters tall.
|
| The one in Norway was only roughly double the height of
| surrounding waves.
| Maursault wrote:
| >> Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than twice
| the height of the waves surrounding it.
|
| Right, so they have to be much more common than said, because
| a rogue wave could be 6" high on glass-calm seas.
| mc32 wrote:
| Basically a five foot wave surrounded by one foot waves would
| be most extremist extremely rogue wave ever.
| whycome wrote:
| 'Extreme' is probably relative to the other waves in the area.
| Like doritos extreme.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| -- having trouble picturing this - from a distance it look like a
| massive wall of water floating along on its own? - waves go up
| and down so why doesnt the masive wave going down change the
| amplitude of the waves in advance of it? - so confusing try to
| picture - the animation in the article didn't help --
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Not sure if this is what you mean but there's a documentary out
| there called 100 Foot Wave that has tons of video footage of
| gigantic waves. It's about surfing, so these waves break, but
| it's worth a watch if you'd like to see these things in action.
| The images of the waves are awe inspiring, even on a TV screen.
| 420official wrote:
| In the video they show the full animation with the surrounding
| wave context and it makes it a little easier to understand than
| the gif.
|
| The first massive wave lumbers through at the same pace of the
| surrounding waves leaving you thinking "Oh that big wave is the
| rogue wave" when suddenly the bottom drops out and an even more
| massive wave comes very fast and seemingly overtakes the slower
| one. It seems like the slower large wave just stops in place
| and reduces in amplitude while the rogue wave overtakes it.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Dunno but you know how you can do a single big wave on a long
| skipping rope traveling down the rope? You like whiplash it.
| thrownawaydad wrote:
| Short, non-technical answer: These waves are actually the "sum"
| of a number of different waves (of different frequency and/or
| phases). It can happen that many of these _usually_ cancel each
| other out in the sum, but once in a blue moon, their peaks
| happen at virtually the same time. Then you get one massive
| pulse. The moments right before and after could look quite
| normal.
| genderwhy wrote:
| Are rogue waves just the various component waves on different
| frequencies lining up "perfectly" such that they sum to one large
| wave? Or are they a different phenomena?
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| They're quite rare, but my understanding is that they can come
| from an angle different from the prevailing winds / waves, so
| it's something else.
| ianvisits wrote:
| No one really knows what causes them - plenty of theories but
| not facts - and that's why they are both exceptionally
| facinating as to how they form, and yet also utterly
| terrifying.
| peteradio wrote:
| I have a theory that there is something down there, deep in
| the uncharted depths of the oceans lurking and causing rogue
| waves, but its just a theory one I dearly hope is wrong...
| [deleted]
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| Even worse, it's standing in our night sky, in periodic
| plain sight, taunting us with it's waxing and waning,
| knowing there's nothing we can do to stop it.
| Nition wrote:
| _Cold-hearted orb that rules the night..._
| vlachen wrote:
| In partnership with the murder-ball of burning hate that
| bakes the day.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Now imagine how scary the rogue holes are, the inverse of
| rogue waves.
| eternalban wrote:
| _"[T]hree years past, there happened to me an event such as
| never happened to mortal man -- or at least such as no man
| ever survived to tell of -- and the six hours of deadly
| terror which I then endured have broken me up body and
| soul."_
|
| _A Descent Into The Maelstrom_ , Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
|
| https://poestories.com/read/descent
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| I may have experienced a _very small one_ , 10-15 years ago
| - and I still have flashbacks.
|
| Was a crew member in a sailing regatta and for one 5-10
| minute period the waves were just coming from everywhere,
| breaking all over the place. It was exhilarating, like
| riding a roller coaster up and down! Then a (relatively)
| very big one, out of the blue. It seemed to go between us
| and the next boat, maybe 60 feet away. From the deck, we
| couldn't even see the top of the mast of the other boat.
|
| And then we fell out of the water.
|
| Our boat, all 30,000 pounds of it, dropped straight down
| and we crashed, hard, into the water below. The mast bent
| so much that the cable stays were loose. The impact threw
| everyone down. The sound: it sounded like the fiberglass
| crunched and broke. For a moment we all thought we were
| dead. But we weren't. The mast snapped back so hard the
| cable stays made a twanging sound. Sails limp - no wind at
| the bottom of the hole. Then the water all around us
| swallowed us up; our buoyancy sent us shooting straight up
| with a lot of force. The wind hit us hard; no time to
| reflect; have to deal with that now.
| glonq wrote:
| Oof. That would make a landlubber out of me.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| All those years of racing, including being in multiple
| collisions, taught me that it is surprisingly difficult
| to sink a boat. As long as you can maintain hull and deck
| integrity, you need a LOT of water inflow in a very short
| amount of time to eliminate buoyancy.
|
| We were never a good team, but I came away from it with
| far more confidence being on the water than I started :)
| rcxdude wrote:
| only kind of, the suprising thing is they are way bigger than
| expected (or rather, rogue waves of a given height are orders
| of magnitude more likely than you would expect from just adding
| together the statistics of each frequency of wave). There's
| some other interaction or non-linear behaviour going on which
| causes them to occur with the frequency that they do, and I
| don't think there's a single model which actually explains
| them.
| saboot wrote:
| Wave dynamics, specifically ones which have interactions with
| the ground, are some of the few systems that need derivatives
| higher than two to describe them. Lots of interesting stuff
| going on
| [deleted]
| DrBazza wrote:
| There aren't just rogue waves, there are rogue holes too. Imagine
| being in a boat and it just drops a 50ft.
| gregoriol wrote:
| I'm surprised someone tried to estimate that this is one-in-1300
| years event when we don't know how they form, have no data on
| them, don't know much about those waves.
| njarboe wrote:
| If you start measuring something (wave height) and detect a
| high value in, say, the first year, you better have a very good
| reason the think the event happens every 1000 years. Especially
| if you are measuring a few points in a very large ocean.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Right. The "once in X years" reporting is always exaggerated,
| by subtly constraining it to a specific geographical point.
|
| If there are 500 measuring stations, then every year some one
| of them is going to experience a once-in-500-years event. We
| just never notice the other 499, and cherry-pick the one
| outlier after it already happened. (Yeah, there can be
| correlation between station measurements; obviously I'm
| speaking in generalities.)
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think what that is, is the probability prediction you get
| from the naive model, known to underestimate the probability
| of very large waves.
| [deleted]
| takk309 wrote:
| The nomenclature of 1 in x years is based on statistics and
| equates to the chance, 1/x, that in a given year this event
| will happen. You don't need 1300 years of data to say this was
| a 1 in 1300 year event, but you can say that this event had a
| 1/1300=7.6^-4 chance of happening in a given year. And that can
| be calculated based on any amount of data. Of course, more data
| will give a higher confidence to the statement.
| [deleted]
| toss1 wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| The buoy was in for at most a handful of years, and catches a
| 1-in-1300 year event in that one location?
|
| The first thought on that should not be "what incredible
| luck!", but "is there something special about this location, or
| is that 1-in-1300 estimate off?".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we don 't know how they form, have no data on them, don't
| know much about those waves_
|
| We know a surprising amount about their mechanics due to
| replication in the lab [1][2]. We don't have lots of
| observational evidence to support the lab effects accurately
| replicating the ocean, but I don't think we've generally seen
| evidence for lab surface water materially differing from ocean
| surface water.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave
|
| [2] https://openresearch-
| repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/70...
| korse wrote:
| I would recommend listening to this song. It is a ballad-ization?
| of a science fiction short story built around the rogue wave
| concept.
|
| Take it however you want, but the stated goal is still valid and
| we have the technology.
|
| https://archive.org/details/filk_fire_in_the_sky/14+Waveride...
| glonq wrote:
| My buddies and I aspire to sail around Vancouver Island, but it's
| stuff like this that scares me.
| pclark wrote:
| I'd probably be more wary of logs in the water than freak waves
| dieselgate wrote:
| I sail in the area and would be more worried about shipping
| traffic and submerged/lost trees or shipping containers. Hope
| you all get to make the trip someday, on my list as well
| worik wrote:
| In the open ocean these are terrifying and why you must always
| be vigilant. But it is close to land where they are deadly
|
| The bottom may be exposed by the trough
|
| They may crest breaking over your boat smashing it
|
| In confined waters maintaining heading may not be possible,
| which is critical
| Jabbles wrote:
| _Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every
| 1,300 years._
|
| Do they mean per-buoy? Or what?
| worik wrote:
| They have no idea and are making up numbers
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I'm really excited about seeing this on HN - the CEO of
| MarineLabs was my roommate in university!
| kposehn wrote:
| A rogue wave captured on film was in the second season of The
| Deadliest Catch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2KqofR05TE
| latchkey wrote:
| Cruise ship a month ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Kuq9lgSyk
| legohead wrote:
| Dunno if the narrator is just hamming it up for the audience
| but what he says completely contradicts the article:
|
| > The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in
| February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded.
|
| Video says it was a 5-story wave.. "60 feet", article's wave
| was 58 feet.
| gorbypark wrote:
| The one confirmed in 2022 wasn't the biggest ever recorded in
| overall height, but the biggest compared to the other
| "regular" waves occurring around it.
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