Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to dive into the vault. This time we're doing
Speaker 1: an episode that originally aired on May nineteen. This one
Speaker 1: was called The Great Wave. It was about giant waves,
Speaker 1: rogue waves. I remember this episode being very interesting, especially
Speaker 1: because in preparing for it, it was when I, uh,
Speaker 1: I learned about the the incredible survival by sea voyage
Speaker 1: of was it the Shackleton Expedition? Yes, I believe so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this one, this one is filled with aquatic peril
Speaker 1: and uh and I seem to recall there's a fair
Speaker 1: amount of sort of looking at at historical accounts and
Speaker 1: people weighing in on exactly what kind of wave we
Speaker 1: were talking about. Here, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: A production of I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, you,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm want to
Speaker 1: kick off this episode by talking about a piece of art.
Speaker 1: And it's a piece of art that I imagine a
Speaker 1: lot of you have seen and if you haven't seen it.
Speaker 1: You can, and you're not driving a vehicle or anything
Speaker 1: right now, you can easily look it up and you
Speaker 1: can certainly find it for the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: It's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. It is
Speaker 1: a Japanese print. It is a title the Great Wave
Speaker 1: off Kanagawa, and it's a nineteenth century Edo period would
Speaker 1: block print by Katsushika Hokusai, and it depicts a great
Speaker 1: wave endangering ships off the coast of Kanagawa. And it
Speaker 1: was once thought to depict a tsunami, but now most
Speaker 1: commentators think that it actually depicts a rogue wave. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: the the artist here, he explored this subject matter many
Speaker 1: times in his career, so if you look at other
Speaker 1: images he created, there are plenty of other waves, but
Speaker 1: this particular print is considered the peak the culmination of
Speaker 1: sixty years in the arts. UM And since it's a
Speaker 1: woodblock print and not a painting, you can actually find
Speaker 1: it in numerous museums around the world, thus increasing the
Speaker 1: odds that you have seen this image, if not online
Speaker 1: and perhaps in purpose in person. But I think one
Speaker 1: of the great things about it is that it captures
Speaker 1: a sense of the majesty of a great wave. The
Speaker 1: idea that it's it's there's like a topography of the
Speaker 1: ocean visible, the ocean surface visible in this picture. That
Speaker 1: that reminds us that a wave can be a mountain. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and the wave in the in the woodblock even what
Speaker 1: do you call it a print or a painting when
Speaker 1: it's the painting whatever it is on this image, Uh,
Speaker 1: the wave resembles the mountain in the background, and the
Speaker 1: mountain and the backgrounds has sort of a blue gray,
Speaker 1: uh slope, and then the white peak of course covered
Speaker 1: in snow. The waves are much like that with these
Speaker 1: uh the white surging foam at the top. But in
Speaker 1: the painting, the foam as these like hooks that almost
Speaker 1: looked like eagles talents reaching out of the top of
Speaker 1: this wall of water. And there's there's a way that
Speaker 1: I at least often look to this painting without even
Speaker 1: realizing they were supposed to be boats represented at the bottom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of easy to miss the boats. They're they're
Speaker 1: swallowed up by what's going on all around. It's a
Speaker 1: beautiful piece of art. And I don't know why, but
Speaker 1: I've always when I've looked at it before thought of
Speaker 1: it as somehow calming or like a picture of sort
Speaker 1: of like serene nature, which is hilarious because it's depicting
Speaker 1: a scene of utter chaos and destruction and terror, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it's spoken like a true landsman, right when
Speaker 1: clearly like this is a product of of an island
Speaker 1: culture that it was very you know, very aware of
Speaker 1: the dangers posed by the by the ocean. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: because I probably am in the same same boat. Uh No.
Speaker 1: Pun intended with you is that when I've seen the
Speaker 1: image in the past, it was just I was like, ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: serene nature. But no, this is a cresting mountain of
Speaker 1: oceanic destruction, or at least potential destruction in terms of
Speaker 1: human activities on or near the ocean the mountain that flows.
Speaker 1: So speaking of the dangers of the ocean, I mean,
Speaker 1: there are many of them, and we know what many
Speaker 1: of them are. But we often discuss ancient beastiaries and
Speaker 1: records of monsters and strange creatures from the ancient world,
Speaker 1: and of course some of the best ones, even through
Speaker 1: like the medieval period, are of sea monsters. So you've
Speaker 1: got these stories about lizards that kill with the gaze
Speaker 1: or giant sea monsters that suck entire ships into their mouths,
Speaker 1: And they can be funny to read about now, especially
Speaker 1: with the certainty that ancient writers had when they talked
Speaker 1: about these subjects. But one point I've made before and
Speaker 1: that I want to echo again is I think it
Speaker 1: was not at all stupid or irrational for ancient people's
Speaker 1: to believe in sea monsters. I think it was a
Speaker 1: perfectly reasonable and rap channel thing for them to assume.
Speaker 1: And there are a few reasons for this. We've touched
Speaker 1: on some of them on the show before. Number one,
Speaker 1: there actually are sea monsters in a way. We just
Speaker 1: call them by different names now, like you know the
Speaker 1: sperm whale, blue whale, giant squid, the sunfish, the lion's
Speaker 1: main jellyfish. These are all giant, magnificent, all inspiring creatures.
Speaker 1: But what's changed is that we've fit them into a
Speaker 1: standard evolutionary taxonomy. We think of them as animals that
Speaker 1: have common origins with the other animals. But when ancient
Speaker 1: sailors told stories of these giant beasts out in the ocean, meany,
Speaker 1: we're probably telling the truth to the best of their ability.
Speaker 1: They saw something huge and strange and terrifying, and they're
Speaker 1: trying to remember and describe what it was. And then
Speaker 1: on top of that, you're dealing with it with just
Speaker 1: a culture and a legacy um of of danger upon
Speaker 1: the sea and beneath the sea. Yes, so there were
Speaker 1: those two things come together. I mean, here there'll be monsters,
Speaker 1: right exactly. And because the sea, you know, a life
Speaker 1: at sea has long I think, been associated with the
Speaker 1: kind of with a kind of daring and bravado. Right.
Speaker 1: But also I think there's another reason it was sort
Speaker 1: of rational to believe in giant krakens that could pull
Speaker 1: ships down to their doom. And it's that Poseidon is
Speaker 1: one of the cruelest and most fickle of the gods.
Speaker 1: That that's not an accident that the Greek myths are
Speaker 1: like that it is not at all uncommon for ships
Speaker 1: to set sail on the high seas and then just vanish,
Speaker 1: leaving behind no trace. At all. Other times you might
Speaker 1: find a giant, sturdy ship wrecked with no apparent cause,
Speaker 1: like it's masked and rigging, smashed bits, with giant holes
Speaker 1: blown in its solid hull. And when when you see
Speaker 1: rex like this, uh, In fact, some of the Rex
Speaker 1: I was looking at in preparation for this episode. It
Speaker 1: calls to mind, uh, I was thinking about that poem
Speaker 1: we've talked about on the show before, Alfred Lord Tennyson's
Speaker 1: The Kraken, where you know, there's this beast battening upon
Speaker 1: huge sea worms in his sleep until the latter fire
Speaker 1: shall heat the deep and he comes up to the surface.
Speaker 1: And of course in the poem he dies. But what's
Speaker 1: more likely, say, he's actually gonna like punch a hole
Speaker 1: right in the middle of your ship. Now, obviously there
Speaker 1: are many ways for ships to wreck and sync causing
Speaker 1: them to vanish without a trace. They can hit rocks,
Speaker 1: they can hit hidden reefs, they can capsize and take
Speaker 1: on water. But there is one particular phenomenon that sailors
Speaker 1: have long been telling these dark, majestically terrifying stories about,
Speaker 1: and it's something that could explain many sudden disappearances of
Speaker 1: seagoing vessels if it was anything more than a fantasy.
Speaker 1: And it's what you mentioned about the woodblock painting earlier.
Speaker 1: The monster wave, the rogue wave also known as a
Speaker 1: freak wave, which I like because it sounds like either
Speaker 1: a musical subgenre or some sort of like misfit style
Speaker 1: punk band, you know, freak wave. It's a genre that
Speaker 1: mixes punk music with carnival music and circus music. No,
Speaker 1: I you know, I say that, but I bet that's
Speaker 1: actually a genre somewhere. Probably at this point all sub
Speaker 1: genres exist. But so, yeah, the the idea of a
Speaker 1: rogue wave or a monster waves, so we're not just
Speaker 1: talking about rough seas in general, but a single gigantic wave,
Speaker 1: an unbelievably high a wall of water that appears as
Speaker 1: if out of nowhere and crashes over your ship like
Speaker 1: a hammer of the sea gods, and so sailors have
Speaker 1: talked about this, and we want to ask today, could
Speaker 1: these tales be true? Do we now know whether they're true?
Speaker 1: And could they explain many of histories vanished ships and
Speaker 1: hulls broken like toys. Now at this point, I do
Speaker 1: want to mention that in our research, I think we'd
Speaker 1: hope to maybe throw in more like a giant wave myths,
Speaker 1: more accounts from say, ancient histories of of giant waves
Speaker 1: as opposed to organic sea monsters. And I'm not saying
Speaker 1: they don't exist. They may very well exist. But I
Speaker 1: had trouble finding them, and we're discussing why that might be.
Speaker 1: I mean, we could go back to what you said earlier,
Speaker 1: how a ship disappears at sea, perhaps caused by a
Speaker 1: giant wave, and the story is about a sea monster,
Speaker 1: or it becomes about an organic sea monster. Yes. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one point of parallel here is that obviously even
Speaker 1: the ancient people's knew about the idea that the ship
Speaker 1: could encounter, say, bad weather while I was out at sea,
Speaker 1: and be wrecked and and all that. So it's not
Speaker 1: like there was no other way for ships to sink.
Speaker 1: But the way in which a rogue wave as a
Speaker 1: concept resembles a sea monster is is that it's unexpected,
Speaker 1: you know that, that it reaches up out of the deep,
Speaker 1: that it's much higher than all the other waves in
Speaker 1: the in the ocean, and it just takes you completely
Speaker 1: by surprise. And that's key here. It's not a situation
Speaker 1: of like, oh, suddenly all the waves were enormous. No,
Speaker 1: suddenly one wave stands vastly um above all the others,
Speaker 1: much like the mountain of a wave in the print
Speaker 1: we were discussing at the top of the episode. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously lots of ships in history of encountered rough seas,
Speaker 1: like certain regions of the ocean and certain weather patterns
Speaker 1: can generate lots of chop and high waves. But ships
Speaker 1: are usually made to withstand bad weather. That's part of
Speaker 1: what ship design is for. You know, you say, okay,
Speaker 1: might encounter this kind of weather, so we need to
Speaker 1: make it this amounts strong to withstand it. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you know you're going around the cape, you're gonna
Speaker 1: you're gonna build and sail vessels designed for for rough seas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and these wave patterns have long been understood to be
Speaker 1: predictable within certain parameters. You make a ship strong and
Speaker 1: she'll hold. But what we're talking about with these monster
Speaker 1: waves stories is a wave that suddenly appears without warning
Speaker 1: and is at least twice as high as all the
Speaker 1: other waves in the sea. And of course, when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a wave of water that's twice as high
Speaker 1: as the other waves around it, uh, it's something where
Speaker 1: you know, the power and destructiveness of it doesn't just
Speaker 1: scale linearly. You know, it becomes a new kind of
Speaker 1: phenomenon you're dealing with. Now, I want to be I
Speaker 1: want to be clear here that we're talking about true
Speaker 1: rogue waves or monster waves, freak waves, etcetera. Here, Uh,
Speaker 1: that do seem to come out of nowhere. And they're
Speaker 1: not to be confused with giant waves generated by seismic activity,
Speaker 1: right like underwater volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or cascades like riding,
Speaker 1: though those can be incredible and I mean, just for
Speaker 1: an example, um, I was reading about the earthquake generated
Speaker 1: tsunami in Alaska's LaToya Bay, which, according to Discover magazine,
Speaker 1: was a four hundred feet taller than the Empire State Building. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're people have done like illustrations of this online.
Speaker 1: You can find where it's It's just staggering like it
Speaker 1: it created this. I think it was supposed to be
Speaker 1: like seventeen hundred feet roughly. Yeah. According to the University
Speaker 1: of Alaska Fairbanks quote, the earthquake shook loose millions of
Speaker 1: cubic yards of dirt and rocks from a forty degree
Speaker 1: slope in the northeast corner of the bay. The rock
Speaker 1: mass displaced a large body of water, causing both of
Speaker 1: the splash wave that rose to one thousand, seven hundred
Speaker 1: forty feet and a gravity wave that was one fifty
Speaker 1: feet high. At the head of the bay. The waves
Speaker 1: sheared and stripped the bark from thousands of trees, some
Speaker 1: of them four ft in diameter, just clear cut the
Speaker 1: land next to the bay. Yeah, and this occurred in
Speaker 1: night again, but they seem seemingly something like it occurred
Speaker 1: at the same area in thirty six and also in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties and eighteen seventy four as well. So
Speaker 1: that's just a taste of the destructive possibilities of seismically
Speaker 1: generated waves in shallow coastal areas. Yeah, and of course
Speaker 1: so we've got tsunamis as well. Tsunamis happen when something
Speaker 1: happens out in the ocean. Uh, there's like an earthquake,
Speaker 1: you know, shift in the sea floor and eruptions something
Speaker 1: like that, and then there's a pressure wave that goes
Speaker 1: throughout the water column towards the shore. As it nears
Speaker 1: the shore. Of course, as it enters the shallow waters,
Speaker 1: that's when it becomes really destructive because that mass of
Speaker 1: pressure it rises up out of the water and it
Speaker 1: you know, keeps coming and flooding against the shore, taking
Speaker 1: whatever is on the shore along with it. Yeah. No, No, obviously,
Speaker 1: atmospheric conditions are complicated, as we've discussed on the show before,
Speaker 1: the complex systems, a lot of forces conversion together, it
Speaker 1: becomes very difficult to predict atmospheric conditions and weather conditions
Speaker 1: increasingly far in the future. And of course we have
Speaker 1: a very similar situation with the movement of the fluids
Speaker 1: in the ocean. But uh, but but with these cases,
Speaker 1: they make a lot more sense to us, right, the tsunami,
Speaker 1: the earthquake generated tsunami, because we can we can easily say, well,
Speaker 1: this is the thing, this is the great event that
Speaker 1: caused the great wave. And the idea of a wave
Speaker 1: just coming out seemingly out of nowhere the sources as
Speaker 1: is seeming a little more elusive, like it seems to
Speaker 1: be emerging from the complex interplay of different storm patterns
Speaker 1: and occurrents. Yeah, you might be just out in a
Speaker 1: storm with waves that are pretty regular, certain height, coming
Speaker 1: and going and going and going and going, and then
Speaker 1: there's one suddenly the mountain arrives, or so the stories
Speaker 1: tell us. Right, So the question is wind sailors tell
Speaker 1: these stories? Are they true? And so I thought maybe
Speaker 1: we should look at a couple of first hand accounts.
Speaker 1: You ready, Robert, let's do it. Who's our first adventure? Well,
Speaker 1: I thought we should turn to one first hand account
Speaker 1: from the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, which came for the
Speaker 1: famous voyage of the James Cared. Now, this voyage was
Speaker 1: one part of the overall survival journey after the failure
Speaker 1: of Shackleton's Antarctic expedition in a ship called the Endurance
Speaker 1: that started in nineteen fourteen. And this is an absolutely
Speaker 1: astounding survival story that is worth looking up if you've
Speaker 1: never read it. And this is this is only one
Speaker 1: part of the story, um, but the short version of
Speaker 1: the context here was a nineteen fourteen Shackleton and crew
Speaker 1: set out for Antarctica in this ship, the Endurance. But
Speaker 1: the ship became trapped in ice in the wet El Sea,
Speaker 1: and the ship eventually sank. And of course this was
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen or fifteen. You're in Antarctica that you know,
Speaker 1: your ship sinking is sort of a death sentence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean even today, it's very bad news. So the
Speaker 1: crew made their way, you know, they're out there stranded,
Speaker 1: and the crew made their way to an uninhabited island
Speaker 1: known as Elephant Island. From after where the ship sank,
Speaker 1: and Shackleton reasoned that their only hope of survival was
Speaker 1: seeking help and enforcement from the island of South Georgia,
Speaker 1: where he knew that there was a whaling station. So
Speaker 1: if they got to where the people were at the
Speaker 1: whaling station there, they could, you know, come back for
Speaker 1: rescue with the bigger ship. But South Georgia was about
Speaker 1: eight hundred miles or hundred kilometers away over terrible seas.
Speaker 1: You know the seas around Antarctica are you know, there's
Speaker 1: they're icy, there's rough, bad weather. It's not a place
Speaker 1: to be sailing in an unreinforced vessel. And the only
Speaker 1: viable vessel they had for making the voyage because remember
Speaker 1: their ships, saying that the best thing they had to
Speaker 1: use was a twenty two foot or about six and
Speaker 1: a half meter lifeboat called the James Care. So Shackleton
Speaker 1: and a few others that they left the rest of
Speaker 1: the crew sheltered at Elephant Island, and they set out
Speaker 1: on this brutal journey to get a rescue party, during
Speaker 1: which they encountered ice and bad weather. The story is
Speaker 1: harrowing and amazing. They talked about how you know ice
Speaker 1: would keep building up on the boat because it's freezing,
Speaker 1: and they'd be soaked by all these horrible waves that
Speaker 1: are pounding on Them's freezing weather, and they'd have to
Speaker 1: keep constantly chipping the ice off of the boat because
Speaker 1: the ice would weigh the boat down and start to
Speaker 1: make it sink um. And you know, this is a
Speaker 1: this is like a multi week journey. And at one point,
Speaker 1: while Shackleton was at the tiller of the boat, uh so,
Speaker 1: there had been very bad weather, of course, and then
Speaker 1: he's at the tiller one time and he thinks he
Speaker 1: sees the clouds breaking and a clear sky up ahead.
Speaker 1: And then I want to quote from Shackleton's own account, quote,
Speaker 1: I called to the other men that the sky was clearing.
Speaker 1: And then a moment later I realized that what I
Speaker 1: had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but
Speaker 1: the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty six
Speaker 1: years experience of the ocean, in all its moods, I
Speaker 1: had not encountered a wave of so gigantic. It was
Speaker 1: a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart
Speaker 1: from the big, white capped seas that had been our
Speaker 1: tireless enemies. For many days, I shouted, for God's sake,
Speaker 1: hold on, it's got us. Then came a moment of
Speaker 1: suspense that seemed drawn out into hours. White surge the
Speaker 1: foam of the breaking sea around us. We felt our
Speaker 1: boat lifted and flung forward like a cork and breaking surf.
Speaker 1: We were in a seething chaos of tortured water, but
Speaker 1: somehow the boat lived through it, half full of water,
Speaker 1: sagging to the dead weight and shuddering under the blow.
Speaker 1: We bailed with the energy of men fighting for life,
Speaker 1: flinging the water over the sides, with every receptacle that
Speaker 1: came to our hands, and after ten minutes of uncertainty,
Speaker 1: we felt the boat renew her life beneath us. So
Speaker 1: the fact that this giant wave did not sink or
Speaker 1: just completely smash their tiny boat to pieces is one
Speaker 1: of the many bizarre miracles of this unbelievable journey. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, you always have to wonder, like how things
Speaker 1: like that happened, But apparently it did according to Shackleton's telling,
Speaker 1: and the crew actually did manage to reach South Georgia.
Speaker 1: According to an account by Gary Pearson, though after they
Speaker 1: got ashore, in South Georgia. Quote at two am on
Speaker 1: the first night ashore, Shackleton Oak, everyone shouting, look out boys,
Speaker 1: hold on, it's going to break on us. It was
Speaker 1: a nightmare. Shackleton thought that the black snow crested cliff
Speaker 1: above them was a giant wave. Yeah. That that is
Speaker 1: an impressive telling. And but yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: you can easily go either way on it. Right, you
Speaker 1: can say, well, all right, Shackleton is a trustworthy source
Speaker 1: of information and this is what he saw. But then
Speaker 1: on the other hand, we have to say he was
Speaker 1: in an extreme situation. I mean, we've spoken before in
Speaker 1: the show about how extreme conditionings can lead to seemingly
Speaker 1: paranormal encounters. You know, if you've been awake for a
Speaker 1: long time, if you're fighting for your survival, etcetera. And
Speaker 1: all of those elements are are here. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are problems with the plausibility of the story. I mean,
Speaker 1: how did this wave not sink and kill them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So whatever happened obviously made an impression. Like this consummate
Speaker 1: survivor had nightmares not of sea monsters in the deep,
Speaker 1: but of a lone killer wave rolling up out of
Speaker 1: the ocean as high as a mountain side. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so one thing about giant waves like this is that
Speaker 1: if they exist, we shouldn't have necessarily expected to hear
Speaker 1: eyewitness accounts of them all that often in history because
Speaker 1: of a couple of things. Number one, of course, if
Speaker 1: they do exist, for a long time people thought them
Speaker 1: to be very rare. But on top of that, if
Speaker 1: sailors in the wooden ships of olden days encountered a
Speaker 1: wave like this, uh, there was not a good chance
Speaker 1: of them living to tell about it. Right. The goliath
Speaker 1: wave would just arise, suddenly, kill everyone, sink the ship,
Speaker 1: and then melt back into the sea without a trace.
Speaker 1: How would you how would you even know it had happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be like asking for eyewitness accounts of the
Speaker 1: Grim Reaper. Yeah, because if if, if the reapers showing up,
Speaker 1: But then it's probably doing its job. Yeah. But the
Speaker 1: of course, Uh, Shackleton's story is not the only one.
Speaker 1: There actually were a lot of stories like this. Many
Speaker 1: mariners told these tales of a giant killer wave. In
Speaker 1: the book Oceanography in the Days of Sale by Ian
Speaker 1: Jones and Joyce Jones, the author is right about the
Speaker 1: French naval explorer and scientists Dumont d'Urville and his his
Speaker 1: disputes with the French scientists Francois Arago about the upper
Speaker 1: limits of wave height quote when the astrolabe and that
Speaker 1: was Derville ship. When the astrolabe in eighteen twenty six
Speaker 1: was making its way across the southern stretches of the
Speaker 1: Indian Ocean, it encountered a gale with mountainous seas in
Speaker 1: which a man was lost overboard. Dumont d'Urville, in his narrative,
Speaker 1: expressed the opinion that the waves reached a height of
Speaker 1: at least eighty to a hundred feet in an era
Speaker 1: when opinions were being expressed that no wave would exceed
Speaker 1: thirty feet. Dumont d'urville's estimations were received, it seemed, with
Speaker 1: some skepticism and France, while Arago rejected and even ridiculed
Speaker 1: Derville's claim. Basically, you know this is just a semen's fancy. Uh.
Speaker 1: He referred in writing to the quote truly prodigious waves
Speaker 1: with which the lively imagination of certain navigators delights in
Speaker 1: covering the seas. That sounded like a burn. That was
Speaker 1: a bit of a burn. I think Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: he was being a bit dismissive here, but maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a break and then we come back. We
Speaker 1: can talk about some physical evidence that actually points to
Speaker 1: the existence of waves like this. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: We've we've discussed accounts anecdotal evidence of giant waves, of
Speaker 1: freak waves, of rogue waves. But now we're going to
Speaker 1: get into what the science has to say. What what
Speaker 1: kind of proof is there, if any, to substantiate these claims, Right,
Speaker 1: you'd want some kind of physical evidence other than just
Speaker 1: people saying they saw a giant wave, because people say
Speaker 1: they saw all sorts of things. But uh, you know, ultimately,
Speaker 1: this is why we have science. This is why we
Speaker 1: have a recording equipment. This is so we can actually
Speaker 1: validate that that waves of this nature exists. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so we talked about the French scientists France while Rago
Speaker 1: being severely doubting that waves like this existed. And from
Speaker 1: a scientific point of view, there had long been reason
Speaker 1: to doubt these accounts of gigantic monster or waves. Not
Speaker 1: that it was impossible for a giant wave to exist,
Speaker 1: but that monstrous waves of the kind reported by mariners,
Speaker 1: you know, the kind that would cause some of the
Speaker 1: damage attributed to them. They were thought to only come
Speaker 1: about on the scale of maybe once in hundreds or
Speaker 1: thousands of years. You know, it's like the thousand year
Speaker 1: storm kind of thing. So like every thousand years a
Speaker 1: wave like this might occur, but then then just might
Speaker 1: not be people around to see it. Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: you know, you've got this question where Shackleton and all
Speaker 1: these others exaggerating, hallucinating misremembering was this the was the
Speaker 1: mountain that flows like a mermaid or something. So I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, you have that argument, right that maybe
Speaker 1: they're just not occurring enough for anyone to ever see them.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't seem right that we have numerous accounts
Speaker 1: um where where people say they witnessed them. But of
Speaker 1: course we also have to consider that, you know the
Speaker 1: fact that ships and seamen again have always gone missing
Speaker 1: like this. You look to the uh, the sheer number
Speaker 1: of shipwrecks, you look to accounts of human activities on
Speaker 1: the sea. Ships have always sunctions, have always encountered bad
Speaker 1: weather or various other uh, you know, things that would
Speaker 1: cause them to perish. Yeah, and another thing we should
Speaker 1: think about is that ships sink and disappear at a
Speaker 1: rate that would absolutely set our hair on fire if
Speaker 1: it was like airplanes or something. You know, if there's
Speaker 1: like one major airline crash, people freak out, but ships
Speaker 1: go missing or sink all the time. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: looking around for some stats on this and today and again,
Speaker 1: as humans command the sea more than ever before, more
Speaker 1: ships are on the sea than than at any point
Speaker 1: in human history, and we're looking at a loss of
Speaker 1: something like a hundred large vessels every year. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: about an average. Yeah, Yeah, I've seen it all since.
Speaker 1: The stat also thrown out there that it basically amounts
Speaker 1: to two vessels per week, and that's just large vessels.
Speaker 1: When you add in smaller vessels, it's even more. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And now, and of course, some of these are gonna
Speaker 1: be clear cases right where they say, oh, you know
Speaker 1: this was the ships sunk because you know, it ran
Speaker 1: aground here, some sort of a collision here, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: in other cases it could inevitably remain a mystery. Is
Speaker 1: just you know, a case by case scenario. So we
Speaker 1: have to ask these cases of the mysterious cases, uh,
Speaker 1: the very sort of case that may have led to
Speaker 1: various nautical superstitions like the Bermuda triangle. Uh and then
Speaker 1: an olden times sea monsters. Could these be due to
Speaker 1: some manner of rogue wave? Yeah, exactly. And so to
Speaker 1: answer that question, I think one good thing, just one
Speaker 1: good place to start, and where people did look for
Speaker 1: a long time was for physical evidence of damage caused
Speaker 1: by rogue waves. Yeah and uh. And for the longest
Speaker 1: we simply didn't have any solid evidence and we didn't
Speaker 1: have any evidence of them, a solid evidence of them occurring.
Speaker 1: We didn't have footage or anything. Uh. So all we
Speaker 1: still had were just those, um those various bits of
Speaker 1: anecdotal and from anecdotal evidence and then experts weighing in
Speaker 1: on what seemed possible and likely. But of course, if
Speaker 1: waves like this were occurring, they should in some ways
Speaker 1: cause damage that we should be able to see and
Speaker 1: detect act because, I mean, what water is amazingly powerful. People,
Speaker 1: we do not have good intuitions about the physical power
Speaker 1: of moving water. Uh. This may come from our experience,
Speaker 1: like swimming for pleasure or splashing in a bathtub. You know,
Speaker 1: we're moving water just glides gently and gracefully around the body,
Speaker 1: causing no harm at all. But our intuitions about water
Speaker 1: really fail when we encounter large masses of fast moving fluids.
Speaker 1: Like the way people behave in flash floods is a
Speaker 1: great example of this. You will a lot of times
Speaker 1: see people who appear to think they can just wade
Speaker 1: through knee high moving floodwaters, only to discover tragically that
Speaker 1: it just washes you away instantly, or in any case
Speaker 1: they think they can drive through. Oh yeah, and and
Speaker 1: it's tragic, but it it's It reflects the fact that
Speaker 1: our intuitions about the power of moving water are not good.
Speaker 1: We underestimate it. Likewise with giant waves. You know, we
Speaker 1: may be used to playing in the surf on a
Speaker 1: beach vacation or something where the waves are harmless. They're fun,
Speaker 1: you can glide with pleasure or over each peak and trough.
Speaker 1: But sufficiently huge walls of moving water that are moving
Speaker 1: fast can act more or less like huge walls of
Speaker 1: concrete smashing right into you at speed, just like tsunamis
Speaker 1: can you know, tear down solid buildings and trees. A
Speaker 1: giant wave of crashing into a ship or a structure
Speaker 1: can cause devastating physical damage. It hits, it moves, it
Speaker 1: twists the structure. I mean it, it's like a hand
Speaker 1: of a god indeed, and besides a heavy hitter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you ask, was there ever physical damage that
Speaker 1: would indicate the existence of seemingly impossible rogue waves, like
Speaker 1: before we had direct records of one, I think the
Speaker 1: answer is yes, there were. There were some very chilling
Speaker 1: and mysterious clues left in the wreckage of battered ships
Speaker 1: and structures in or near the water. Uh. There there
Speaker 1: are stories going way back to like waves crashing against
Speaker 1: lighthouses that that are so far up off the water
Speaker 1: it seems impossible that like a wave could have damaged them.
Speaker 1: You know, lighthouses more than a hundred feet up off
Speaker 1: the normal waterline, with windows smashed out and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and you'd be like, how did that happen? In N two,
Speaker 1: the mobile offshore drilling platform, the Ocean Ranger, was apparently
Speaker 1: damaged by a giant wave off the coast of Canada.
Speaker 1: Its sustained damage to its ballast control room, which only
Speaker 1: could have happened if there was an extremely high wave,
Speaker 1: and this led to a chain reaction of events that
Speaker 1: caused the platform to sink and tragically all eighty four
Speaker 1: crew members died. Everyone aboard died when this thing sank.
Speaker 1: But there were also there there have been stories all
Speaker 1: throughout the twentieth century of like ocean liners about you know,
Speaker 1: passenger vessels and cargo vessels and naval vessels that would
Speaker 1: report being suddenly hit by a giant wave that the
Speaker 1: just ricked havoc upon the ship. You know, it would
Speaker 1: damage the bridge, it would rip off the mast and rigging.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it would rip away lifeboats that were like you know,
Speaker 1: had steel bolts holding them in place. Things that wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense if it was just rocking in normal bad weather.
Speaker 1: But even with all this physical evidence of of structures
Speaker 1: and ships being hit by these powerful events, it will
Speaker 1: still be hard to meassure and confirm the existence of
Speaker 1: these giant rogue waves firsthand, because number one, you can't
Speaker 1: predict in advance when one will appear, Like there are
Speaker 1: obviously better places and times to look for them, but
Speaker 1: you can't know when one's going to happen or where.
Speaker 1: And then if when one does show up, you suddenly
Speaker 1: have a number of priorities, yeah, exactly ahead of perhaps
Speaker 1: recording it. And that being said, we are increasingly in
Speaker 1: an age of just ubiquitous recording equipment. So who knows
Speaker 1: what the very near future will bring. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: when one does appear that there's generally not time to
Speaker 1: react and track and observe it, like you're saying, it's
Speaker 1: just there, and then within a few seconds you will
Speaker 1: very possibly be dead. So the key here really is
Speaker 1: to to not, of course, not just depend on eyewitness accounts,
Speaker 1: which we already had, and of course there's an inherent
Speaker 1: problem there, uh, and we can't go looking for them,
Speaker 1: uh per se because their difficulties there. What you need
Speaker 1: are essentially machine recordings, passive detections, some sort of detection
Speaker 1: system that that will say, it will tell you like
Speaker 1: what what sort of wave activity is occurring near a
Speaker 1: given vessel or a near a given offshore platform and
Speaker 1: one that is lucky or unlucky enough to catch one
Speaker 1: in the act. And so the history of rogue wave
Speaker 1: of science I think really changed in nine right, because
Speaker 1: that's when we finally did get this this sort of evidence.
Speaker 1: So it was January one in the North Sea, uh,
Speaker 1: the North Sea platform drop Ner, which is a gas platform.
Speaker 1: This is built in nineteen eighty four and it consists
Speaker 1: of seven risers and even today it's an important complex
Speaker 1: in the Norwegian oil industry. So this would be situated
Speaker 1: like in the North Sea between Norway and Scotland. Basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: so what's your you know, this is like these are
Speaker 1: rough seas. Yeah, But on this particular day, equipment aboard
Speaker 1: the platform, namely a downward look laser recorded a monster
Speaker 1: of a wave, so significant wave height in the area.
Speaker 1: This is just like the average sort of wave height
Speaker 1: that was occurring was already twelve meters or thirty nine
Speaker 1: point thirty seven feet. Okay, so everything was already like really,
Speaker 1: that's that sounds horrible. I would not I wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to be anywhere near that. You know, you don't want
Speaker 1: to take your James Carrot out on that, right. But then,
Speaker 1: according to the data, a wave rolled in that was
Speaker 1: twenty five point six meters high or a three point
Speaker 1: nine feet Now, as is often the case, you you
Speaker 1: might just hear a number and it might not mean
Speaker 1: anything to you, but do your best to stop for
Speaker 1: a second here and picture it. Yeah, we're talking a
Speaker 1: seven story building of a wave and uh, and it's
Speaker 1: coming at the platform and indeed the platform sustained Uh,
Speaker 1: minor damage, luckily, but that damage was enough to to
Speaker 1: verify the reality of the wave. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: showing that this wasn't just a recording anomaly where you know,
Speaker 1: the laser went wonky or something a seagull flew undwritten
Speaker 1: or whatever would cause it to to to produce some
Speaker 1: sort of an anomaly. Uh No, we also have the
Speaker 1: physical damage to the structure to back up what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they've got the they've got the accurate scientific reading
Speaker 1: from this instrument, and they've got corroborating evidence. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't just a freak measurement. It was in fact a
Speaker 1: freak wave, a rogue wave. And so in the first
Speaker 1: day of the new year, we entered an era in
Speaker 1: which the rogue wave was no longer purely a myth.
Speaker 1: It was a reality. And from there we enter the
Speaker 1: decades of figuring out, well, what's the frequency, what's the cause,
Speaker 1: and ultimately what is the risk. Yeah, now, so you
Speaker 1: might ask the question, Okay, we've just been talking about
Speaker 1: big waves, what is a rogue wave? Technically I think
Speaker 1: I alluded to this earlier, but a rogue wave is
Speaker 1: defined in relative terms, right, So it's a wave that's
Speaker 1: greater than twice the size of all the other waves
Speaker 1: in the same area at the same time. Uh. And yes,
Speaker 1: a rogue waves do occur even in the context of
Speaker 1: very powerful regular wave patterns. So even in places where
Speaker 1: the waves are unusually high and choppy, you can get
Speaker 1: these things that stand out that are more than twice
Speaker 1: as tall as the other waves around them. Because again
Speaker 1: this North Sea example, like, those were some pretty tall waves.
Speaker 1: I mean, what are we talking earlier about, um in
Speaker 1: about earlier experts thinking that like thirty feet was more
Speaker 1: or less the limited. Yeah, that that was long believed
Speaker 1: to be about where waves capped off at least in
Speaker 1: the kind of conditions you'd expect every year. Right, and
Speaker 1: so the the just the ambient wave height in the
Speaker 1: in the area was already uh, in excess of that. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe we should talk about how rogue waves
Speaker 1: exactly cause damage to ships, right, because there there are
Speaker 1: multiple waves that being hit by this flowing mountain, this
Speaker 1: giant wall of water can sink you and destroy you.
Speaker 1: Of course, any time a ship is hit by a wave,
Speaker 1: it's physical structure can just be directly damaged by like
Speaker 1: the force of the impact and this is this is
Speaker 1: especially relevant to the superstructure of a ship's superstructure is
Speaker 1: what you call all that stuff that's sticking up off
Speaker 1: the top of the hull, like the mast, the rigging,
Speaker 1: the bridge, the lifeboats. It can all be smashed two
Speaker 1: bits or ripped apart. And of course a lake's worth
Speaker 1: of water is going to wash over the top of
Speaker 1: the vessel. And if there's a wave for the vessel
Speaker 1: to take this water on, it very well can do that.
Speaker 1: So that's your first problem. And I think that's an
Speaker 1: easy one to miss because again, like you said, we
Speaker 1: we just we often don't think about just the sheer
Speaker 1: punch of that water, especially when it is like a
Speaker 1: fist the size of of of lake's worth of water. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: just imagine you are standing in the bridge of the
Speaker 1: ship and this wall of water comes across you. So
Speaker 1: it washes over the hull, it washes over the deck,
Speaker 1: and it smashes into the bridge. And what what very
Speaker 1: well could happen there is if you know, if the
Speaker 1: bridge is not in some significant way destroyed, it may
Speaker 1: well smashed through all the windows and throw all that
Speaker 1: glass at you and wash into the bridge. But so
Speaker 1: if it hits a ship laterally, like hits a ship
Speaker 1: on the side, the ship can be capsized to buy
Speaker 1: a rogue wave, flipped over on its side or upside down,
Speaker 1: which of course can lead to foundering. You don't want
Speaker 1: your ship sideways, um if it gets If a ship
Speaker 1: gets hit head on by a rogue wave, this can
Speaker 1: also harm. It caused major problems. It can lead to
Speaker 1: the bow or the stern or the ship being lifted
Speaker 1: in an angle up out of the water. And if
Speaker 1: it's a large ship, this can be really dangerous because Robert,
Speaker 1: you remember that scene in Titanic, you know where the
Speaker 1: ship starts sinking from the bow in and the stern
Speaker 1: of the boat is lifted up at an angle in
Speaker 1: the air. Shipholes are extremely heavy and they're not designed
Speaker 1: to withstand sheer stresses on the hull of that immensity,
Speaker 1: Like the structure can't support half of the way to
Speaker 1: the ship hanging up in the air. So the Titanic,
Speaker 1: of course kind of cracked like a celery stalk. I
Speaker 1: think I was reading that. The main theory now is
Speaker 1: that the crack started at the bottom at a week
Speaker 1: point along the base of the ship, and then it
Speaker 1: just cracked off, and then the bow sank, and then
Speaker 1: the stern bobbed for a bit and then sank as well.
Speaker 1: But of course giant waves can cause other large ships
Speaker 1: to do the same. So if the wave washes over you,
Speaker 1: you can end up with one end of the ship
Speaker 1: sort of lifted poking up out of the water as
Speaker 1: it comes out of this wave motion, and that stress
Speaker 1: can crack or or otherwise significantly damaged the hull, which
Speaker 1: of course again can make you sink. So there there
Speaker 1: are a lot of ways that a giant wave can
Speaker 1: mess you up. You just don't want them at all.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna take one more break. When we
Speaker 1: come back, we're gonna discuss some of the causes for
Speaker 1: rogue waves and also a very recent paper that explored
Speaker 1: the question just how often are these occurring and how
Speaker 1: powerful are they? All Right, we're back. So we're looking
Speaker 1: at the question first of what causes rogue waves, and
Speaker 1: this is not a fully settled question. I think that
Speaker 1: there are some, uh some competing and not necessarily mutually
Speaker 1: exclusive hypotheses here, right, So first let's go back to
Speaker 1: the dropping or wave for a moment. According to the
Speaker 1: European Center for Medium range weather forecasts, high resolution retrospective forecasts, forecasts,
Speaker 1: I mean's going backwards in time retrocasts. UM. Quote suggests
Speaker 1: that waves driven by a southward moving polar low interacted
Speaker 1: with a substantial local wind generated wave system to produce
Speaker 1: the conditions conducive to the observed large rogue wave. And
Speaker 1: that's from work by Bitlow at all. Okay, so that's
Speaker 1: saying that there are there were conflicting wave patterns that
Speaker 1: that came together in a way that they think created
Speaker 1: this massive wave. It was something about the way that
Speaker 1: these two different patterns interacted when they when they crashed together. Right.
Speaker 1: And you know, again storm systems, weather and the movement
Speaker 1: to the ocean. These are complex systems that are often
Speaker 1: difficult force to understand. I think we can all understand
Speaker 1: the power of convergence, you know, when you have have
Speaker 1: I mean, we see this is something that's understandable about whether, right,
Speaker 1: we have two fronts coming together. Um, you know, we
Speaker 1: realize that can be bad news. Um and uh, and
Speaker 1: so it's seemingly we've had a similar situation here. Um,
Speaker 1: there's two energetic systems coming together and it creates conditions
Speaker 1: that are optimal for this extra large wave to rise
Speaker 1: up out of the sea. And I'll talk more about
Speaker 1: stuff like that in just a minute. They also point
Speaker 1: to the work of cavalry at all from and they
Speaker 1: point out that also that we shouldn't think of rogue
Speaker 1: waves as ultrawere altra rare once a generation occurrences. Rather quote,
Speaker 1: such waves are a regular part of large storms and
Speaker 1: coming across them is just a matter of probability, depending
Speaker 1: on the spatial and temporal scales considered. So the dropping
Speaker 1: a wave was probably a result of these two crossing
Speaker 1: low frequency wave systems, and it's it's, it's and it
Speaker 1: may be more calm than we initially thought, especially with
Speaker 1: fast moving storms. Yeah, so what exactly is like the
Speaker 1: physical mechanism that causes them in these situations, Well, that's
Speaker 1: still being investigated. But there do appear to be several
Speaker 1: potential causes and explanations. Like I said, I think these
Speaker 1: are not mutually exclusive, like some might explain some rogue
Speaker 1: waves and others might explain others. According to the n
Speaker 1: o A, A picks out a couple of main ones
Speaker 1: that it identifies as as the primary candidates. One is
Speaker 1: wave interference. So when you study the propagation of waves,
Speaker 1: and this is not just waves in water. This is
Speaker 1: waves of all kinds like electromagnetic radiation waves, sound waves,
Speaker 1: waves through matter like like you see in water. When
Speaker 1: you see these uh, when you look at the propagation
Speaker 1: of these types of waves, you begin to see that
Speaker 1: when patterns of waves come into contact with one another,
Speaker 1: they create an interference pattern. And this means that waves can,
Speaker 1: for example, sort of cancel each other out. This is
Speaker 1: also known as destructive interference. You might have seen a
Speaker 1: demonstration of this with like speakers. If you take like
Speaker 1: sound speakers and you place them at just the perfect
Speaker 1: distance apart away from you, the sound waves can actually
Speaker 1: cancel each other out, and suddenly you're not hearing the
Speaker 1: sound they're making anymore. But if you turn off one
Speaker 1: of the speakers, then you can hear it again because
Speaker 1: they're not canceling each other out anymore. So that's destructive interference.
Speaker 1: When the peaks and the troughs are um are alternating
Speaker 1: canceling each other out. But peaks and troughs can also
Speaker 1: line up to multiply one another into giant waves, and
Speaker 1: this is known as constructive interference. Ironically, it's the constructive
Speaker 1: interference that is destructive to our stuff, our ships, and
Speaker 1: our structures. Uh. So that's one thing, just the normal
Speaker 1: kinds of wave wave interference patterns. Another thing sounds like
Speaker 1: it taps into the explanation we were just discussing, and
Speaker 1: that's the interaction of water currents with wave patterns created
Speaker 1: by storms. Essentially, when the current is flowing one way
Speaker 1: and storm winds are pushing surface waves the opposite way,
Speaker 1: this can cause an interaction that shortens the frequency of waves,
Speaker 1: and this sometimes leads to waves joining together and forming
Speaker 1: these gigantic rogue waves. But there's one other major proposed
Speaker 1: mechanism or proposed explanation I was reading about two. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this is a hypothesis that deals with nonlinear effects.
Speaker 1: So the details of this are far over my head,
Speaker 1: but I'll do my best. Basically, some research shows that
Speaker 1: you can actually predict the formation of rogue waves if
Speaker 1: you model ocean waves with reference to to a nonlinear
Speaker 1: version of the Shreddinger equation, which of course we normally
Speaker 1: would use to model the behavior of objects at the
Speaker 1: quantum scale, such as individual atoms. But the the interesting
Speaker 1: thing about matter about objects at the quantum scale, like
Speaker 1: atoms or electrons or photons. Is that in many ways
Speaker 1: they seem to behave like waves. You know, that's one
Speaker 1: of the great paradoxes of quantum mechanics, is well, how
Speaker 1: can a particle behave like a wave pattern? But the
Speaker 1: shredding your equation and it's highly predictive. It tells us yes,
Speaker 1: they do in fact behave like a wave pattern, and
Speaker 1: you need to model them like a wave pattern or
Speaker 1: you can't predict what they're gonna do. So the shredding
Speaker 1: your equation is is useful at modeling and predicting these
Speaker 1: behavior of these wave patterns. But but also apparently the
Speaker 1: non linear version of it is relevant to predicting the
Speaker 1: behavior of waves at large scale, like waves in the ocean.
Speaker 1: And the mathematical functions underlying this explanation, Like I said,
Speaker 1: they're way over my head. But essentially it's a model
Speaker 1: that shows how normal interacting wave patterns, just you know,
Speaker 1: standard waves going back and forth in the ocean can
Speaker 1: sometimes become unstable and result in one wave, one wave
Speaker 1: peak leaching or sucking energy from the surrounding wave peaks,
Speaker 1: reducing the surrounding waves, and this one wave becoming huge
Speaker 1: in the process, so that that's another proposed explanation. So
Speaker 1: where are we earlier or in our understanding of rogue waves.
Speaker 1: That's probably the next logical question to get to, because
Speaker 1: if we've discussed already, it's like we we've we we
Speaker 1: haven't known for sure they exist for too terribly long,
Speaker 1: and we're still we're still competing or multiple scenarios that
Speaker 1: may explain how they're occurring. Well, I looked to a
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen research paper from the University of Southampton
Speaker 1: in the UK, and basically what they did is they
Speaker 1: looked at that they decided to take. Instead of like
Speaker 1: a global look at the data, they tried to isolate it. Uh.
Speaker 1: They looked to fifteen different buoys on the US West
Speaker 1: then cboard, and they looked at a twenty year window,
Speaker 1: So we're looking at ninety four through as being the
Speaker 1: window of data that they were looking at isolated to
Speaker 1: this this region. And uh, this study revealed the following. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, rogue waves vary greatly depending on the
Speaker 1: area of sea and the time period focused on the
Speaker 1: first part of that I think makes sense because we
Speaker 1: discussed it just needs to be twice as big as
Speaker 1: the as the waves in the area. And also this
Speaker 1: is very key. Across to the two decade windows studied,
Speaker 1: instances of rogue waves fell slightly, while the size of
Speaker 1: the individual waves increased. Okay, so there's less of them,
Speaker 1: but they're more powerful when you do get them right.
Speaker 1: Kind of a good news, bad day situation, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They also found found that you know, rogue waves are
Speaker 1: more prevalent, prevalent and uh and severe in winter months,
Speaker 1: and they're they're happening with increasing frequency within calmer background seas.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting. Now we know from previous just first
Speaker 1: of all, from anecdotes, you know, common sailor's knowledge, but
Speaker 1: also I think from more recent research that there are
Speaker 1: rogue wave hot spots in the world where there's particularly
Speaker 1: dangerous sorts of interaction between ocean currents and weather. I know,
Speaker 1: for example, one place that's believed to be a rogue
Speaker 1: wave of hot spot is like the southern Cape of Africa.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're you're going around the Cape of
Speaker 1: Good Hope, it's long been understood as treacherous waters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, it long believed to be a place
Speaker 1: of bad weather, but also apparently a place of rogue waves,
Speaker 1: So everyone's probably wondering, well, how often are these things occurring? Again,
Speaker 1: there was once this idea that these were once in
Speaker 1: a lifetime events that it was it was like seeing
Speaker 1: a unicorn on the high seas. But it looks like
Speaker 1: now we're talking many times per day in the global
Speaker 1: ocean um and then you know, that's a ship. That's
Speaker 1: a concern for ships at sea, not only you know,
Speaker 1: the global shipping industry, but other vessels as well. H
Speaker 1: A two thousand four study identified more than ten giant
Speaker 1: waves above the twenty five meter or eighty two footmark
Speaker 1: uh during a near three week window. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that makes you thankful that the ocean
Speaker 1: is big and we're not on most of it most
Speaker 1: of the time. But there's a lot of us out
Speaker 1: there and a lot of our stuff out there at
Speaker 1: any given time. Also, again, yeah we're there. There's more
Speaker 1: human activity on the oceans than every or before. Uh.
Speaker 1: Just to give everyone a taste of just that the
Speaker 1: shipping industry alone, because because the shipping industry is huge,
Speaker 1: it's easy to take for granted, but it is how uh,
Speaker 1: most of the goods make their way around the world.
Speaker 1: They're not traveling by airplane, they're traveling via ships. Uh.
Speaker 1: Quin I found some good stats on this from the
Speaker 1: International Chamber of Shipping. So, first of all, the international
Speaker 1: shipping industry is responsible for the carriage of around nine
Speaker 1: of world trade, and a given ship shipping vessel, we're
Speaker 1: talking of a two hundred million dollar investment. Like that's
Speaker 1: the when when you see these ships that are laden
Speaker 1: with shipping containers, Uh, that's a two hundred million dollar vessel.
Speaker 1: You're probably looking at the operation of merchant ships generates
Speaker 1: an estimated annual income of over half a trillion US
Speaker 1: dollars and freight rates. They're over fifty thousand merchant ships
Speaker 1: trading internationally, transporting every kind of cargo. And the world
Speaker 1: fleet and shipping is it's in over a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty nations and manned by over a million seafares of
Speaker 1: virtually every nationality. So it's it's immense and there's more
Speaker 1: of it than ever before. And then we have these
Speaker 1: waves out there. Yeah, and so the idea that these
Speaker 1: waves could be increasing in intensity or becoming more dangerous,
Speaker 1: that's pretty scary because it doesn't just mean like it's
Speaker 1: scarier for people who physically go out on the water.
Speaker 1: Of course, it certainly is, but it also represents a
Speaker 1: threat to UH, to the world economy, you know, the
Speaker 1: economics of goods moving back and forth. Um. And then
Speaker 1: just some more data from this particular paper, the University
Speaker 1: of Southampton paper UH, just considering the u s West Coast,
Speaker 1: which was the focus of his study. They say that
Speaker 1: here you have of total US containerized trade and that
Speaker 1: this is the largest u AS gateway for container vessels. UH.
Speaker 1: And even when ships are not sunk or capsized by
Speaker 1: a wave like this, there's still the risk of rogue
Speaker 1: wave induced collisions. So you know, that's another thing to consider.
Speaker 1: If you have two boats that are near each other, uh,
Speaker 1: and you have an enormous wave of disrupting the waters,
Speaker 1: then there's a possibility that things could slam together, which
Speaker 1: they're certainly not designed to do. Then, on top of that,
Speaker 1: this is a region where there's just a high volume
Speaker 1: of tanker, bolt carrier, roll on, roll off, passenger fishing ships, um.
Speaker 1: You know, all focused around the ports in the region.
Speaker 1: And then of course you have a fair amount of
Speaker 1: activity just to service offshore structures in the oil and
Speaker 1: gas industry. Coming back to in our examples with oil platforms.
Speaker 1: Earlier rogue waves have also swept people out to sea
Speaker 1: in California and Oregon and uh And then one other point,
Speaker 1: the researchers indicated the global climate change isn't necessarily a
Speaker 1: factor in all of this. Part of this is that
Speaker 1: there's just a great deal of oscillation with with with
Speaker 1: the size of these waves, and we're dealing with such
Speaker 1: a complex system and we have only two decades of
Speaker 1: rogue wave data to deal with here. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, they don't seem to be ruling it out.
Speaker 1: I mean cause of increasing energy, right, if the sea
Speaker 1: levels arising in the oceans are getting warmer and you're
Speaker 1: getting more intense weather patterns. Yeah, So basically they're not
Speaker 1: saying it's not the cause. You're just saying we were
Speaker 1: not presenting that with this data. Ultimately, they again only
Speaker 1: two decades worth of data to go on here. I
Speaker 1: was reading an interview from back in two thousand and
Speaker 1: ten with the author Susan Casey, who wrote a book
Speaker 1: that I read a few years ago and I absolutely loved.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a half memoir, half science book about
Speaker 1: the Fara Lawn Islands off the off sort of around
Speaker 1: where San Francisco is um and and about great white sharks,
Speaker 1: and that that book was called The Devil's Teeth. But
Speaker 1: this interview was about another book she wrote, apparently a
Speaker 1: book about giant waves called The Wave of published in
Speaker 1: two thousand ten, And in the interview she talks about
Speaker 1: how companies that right insurance policies for maritime voyages are
Speaker 1: concerned about increasing risk, and part of this risk seems
Speaker 1: to be concerned about rogue waves. She says, quote Lloyd's
Speaker 1: of London. Of course, you know, big maritime insurer Lloyd's
Speaker 1: of London. Is that really quite concerned about cruise ships?
Speaker 1: One of the guys said to me, this is a
Speaker 1: high concentration of risk. You've got five thousand people on
Speaker 1: boats that are getting bigger and bigger, and they're going
Speaker 1: into gnarly or and gnarly or places. They're all over Antarctica. Now.
Speaker 1: For example, recently one of the hardier cruise ships got
Speaker 1: hit by a hundred foot rogue wave and all of
Speaker 1: its navigation equipment got knocked out and the windows got broken.
Speaker 1: During another recent cruise in Antarctica, all all the people
Speaker 1: ended up in the water, which isn't a good situation.
Speaker 1: By the grace of God, there was another boat nearby.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about big picture risk here. I just
Speaker 1: want to stress that we're not true more in this episode.
Speaker 1: We're not attempting to scare you out of your next
Speaker 1: oceanic voyage, cruise or anything of that nature. Though I
Speaker 1: think if that were our goal, we could do a
Speaker 1: very good job of it. But well, no, that is
Speaker 1: not our goal. I mean, but yeah, there are obviously
Speaker 1: um going to be huge risks to ocean ocean voyages
Speaker 1: of all kinds, and one of the biggest impacts that
Speaker 1: would be there would obviously be trade. I do think
Speaker 1: it's interesting that there are still, uh such mysterious, unresolved
Speaker 1: questions about the behavior of waves of waves in the ocean.
Speaker 1: I mean, this seems like something that people have been
Speaker 1: aware of for a very long time, been studying for
Speaker 1: a very long time. But it's one of those kind
Speaker 1: of chaotic and complex things that maybe we don't often
Speaker 1: stop to to appreciate the mystery and majesty of what's
Speaker 1: easy to just watch wave activity in the ocean, you know,
Speaker 1: said on the beach or on the deck of a
Speaker 1: ship and watch the waves, and it's calming, and it's
Speaker 1: it's rhythmic. There seems to be a I mean, there
Speaker 1: is an order to it, but it seems to there
Speaker 1: seems to be an order that we can grasp, that
Speaker 1: we can that we can understand from a human perspective.
Speaker 1: And of course, really it's it's ultimately more the domain
Speaker 1: of of increasingly complex um computer simulation programs, if not
Speaker 1: the machinations of some sort of vengeful sea God. Well,
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons we're so tempted to
Speaker 1: wish to think of the waves as regular as because
Speaker 1: we can listen to them is because it's auditory. Because
Speaker 1: it's auditory information instead of just being visual information. It
Speaker 1: assumes a kind of background rhythm whenever we're by the ocean,
Speaker 1: or we hear something recorded by the ocean, or we're
Speaker 1: on the ocean. Uh, you know, the the wave activity
Speaker 1: becomes the steady, reliable percussion of our lives. And then
Speaker 1: the idea that one of these waves could suddenly reach
Speaker 1: out and be not like the others, be this angry
Speaker 1: hand of God feels like a violation of what nature
Speaker 1: has asked us to expect. Yeah, the white noise app
Speaker 1: that I used to sleep every night. Never gives me
Speaker 1: a rogue way. This is always just consistent calming oceanic activity.
Speaker 1: You know what if it just suddenly screamed your name?
Speaker 1: All right, well there you have it. You know, as
Speaker 1: as we've mentioned before, you know, we were both landsmen here,
Speaker 1: so we would love to hear from the sea folk
Speaker 1: out there. Uh. If you have any anything to add
Speaker 1: on this, have you encountered uh sizeable waves or even
Speaker 1: if you have, you witnessed or seeing the handiwork of
Speaker 1: something that could be classified as a rogue wave, we
Speaker 1: would love to hear from you. Absolutely. Ye. Please get
Speaker 1: in touch. In the meantime. If you want to listen
Speaker 1: to this episode or more episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's where you'll find the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode. Uh, and that also features the the
Speaker 1: artwork the Great Wave off kind of God what. You
Speaker 1: can see this image in case you're not sure you've
Speaker 1: seen it before, and if you want to interact with
Speaker 1: other listeners, be sure to head on over to the
Speaker 1: discussion module. It's called Stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module.
Speaker 1: It is a Facebook group. Uh, it is. It's a
Speaker 1: pretty decent place as far as social media goes. Uh,
Speaker 1: one of my more one of my few preferred social
Speaker 1: media destinations these days. Literally the only reason I still
Speaker 1: have a Facebook account, So make it your reason as well,
Speaker 1: and as always too, if you want to. If you
Speaker 1: want to support our show, you know you can buy
Speaker 1: some merchandise through our T shirts store. That's always appreciated.
Speaker 1: But the best thing you can do is just to
Speaker 1: rate and review the show where you have the power
Speaker 1: to do so, and tell a friend if an episode
Speaker 1: really resonated with you, share it with someone else. I mean, really,
Speaker 1: that's the That's the bread and butter of this show's appeal.
Speaker 1: Big thank you as always to our excellent audio producer,
Speaker 1: Tor Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback about this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, tell us about rogue waves, tell us about
Speaker 1: waves in general, tell us your stories of the high seas,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio, app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: B b b B is gradudud prop