They have been called multiple names: “extreme storm waves”, “walls of water”, “freak waves” or “killer waves”. Today, we call them rogue waves. These waves have lived on as tales told by sailors for centuries. They have been the cause of many sunk ships and according to researchers, they can sink even a modern ship due to their hight of 20m tall and massive body of water. Sailors have shared evocative descriptions of abnormally large “rogue waves” that appear out of the blue.
On the other hand, with little or no hard evidence (and the size of the waves being beyond comprehension) scientists had long dismissed them as tall tales. Until half a century ago when scientific evidence surfaced. According to scientists’ best understanding of how waves are generated, a 30m wave might be expected once every 30,000 years. Rogue waves could safely be classified alongside mermaids and sea monsters.
What exactly are rogue waves?
At any given moment, thousands of waves are passing and interacting through a specific area of ocean. The faster the wind is and the longer it blows, the stronger and larger the waves.
Rogues are those waves which are greater than twice the size of surrounding waves, are very unpredictable, and often come unexpectedly from directions other than prevailing wind and waves.
Such waves are quite uncommon, and their unpredictability makes it very hard to study them and their causes. However, two main cases as per how they are formed exist today:
Constructive interference. Extreme waves often form because swells, while traveling across the ocean, do so at different speeds and directions. As these swells pass through one another, their crests, troughs, and lengths sometimes coincide and reinforce each other. This process can form unusually large, towering waves that quickly disappear. If the swells are travelling in the same direction, these mountainous waves may last for several minutes before subsiding.
Focusing of wave energy. When waves formed by a storm develop in a water current against the normal wave direction, an interaction can take place which results in a shortening of the wave frequency. This can cause the waves to dynamically join together, forming very big ‘rogue’ waves. The currents where these are sometimes seen are the Gulf Stream and Agulhas current. Extreme waves developed in this fashion tend to be longer lived.
So far, scientists are not yet able to predict these deadly waves due to not properly understand them. For anyone on a ship or isolated oil rig, such out of the blue waves could prove fatal. The good side of the coin is that such waves are very rare.
Sources: BBC, Ocean Service, Science
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