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Extreme 'rogue wave' in the North Pacific confirmed as most extreme on record
- GalenErso 4y agoI'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.
- vkou 4y agoSubmarines won't do the coastal bombardment and air strikes and escort and reconnaissance work that regular navies are capable of.
- scrumper 4y agoWell 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 4y ago> 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.
- MarkMarine 4y agoAircraft 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.
- worik 4y ago> 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 4y agoThere have been plenty of aircraft carriers sunk, not sure what your point is.
- TylerE 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra 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.
- whycome 4y agoI'm curious how such a wave could be....intentionally created.
- msisk6 4y agoThat's actually a minor plot point in Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock."
- bee_rider 4y agoThere 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 4y ago> 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 4y agoThere 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
- kldavis4 4y agoIf you are interested in this topic, I recommend _The Wave_ by Susan Casey. She covers both rogue waves and big wave surfers.
- cossatot 4y agoI 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 4y agoYeah, 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.
- genderwhy 4y agoAre 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?
- ianvisits 4y agoNo 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 4y agoI 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...
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- SpeedilyDamage 4y agoEven 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.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoNow imagine how scary the rogue holes are, the inverse of rogue waves.
- Jabbles 4y agoSuch an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. Do they mean per-buoy? Or what?
- worik 4y agoThey have no idea and are making up numbers
- CapmCrackaWaka 4y agoI 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 4y agoIt 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 4y agoas 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."
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- PopAlongKid 4y ago> 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.
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- gregoriol 4y agoI'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.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave [2] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/70717/2/01_Chabchoub_Rogue_wave_observation_in_a_2011.pdf https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/70...
- njarboe 4y agoIf 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 4y agoRight. 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.)
- simplotek 4y ago> Right. The "once in X years" reporting is always exaggerated, by subtly constraining it to a specific geographical point. Not really. You got it exactly backwards. The return period of an event is determined based on all recorded events. This does not mean that massive events that took place in the past didn't existed if no record was kept. Consequently, massive events are underrepresented both in magnitude and in frequency, and consequently estimates of their return period tend to be larger. Think of it this way: the concept of the return period of an event (i.e., this is a one in X year's event) is determined based on the average time between similar events.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- 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 --
- rightbyte 4y agoDunno 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 4y agoShort, 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.
- dclowd9901 4y agoNot 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 4y agoIn 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.
- _whiteCaps_ 4y agoI'm really excited about seeing this on HN - the CEO of MarineLabs was my roommate in university!
- glonq 4y agoMy buddies and I aspire to sail around Vancouver Island, but it's stuff like this that scares me.
- worik 4y agoIn 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
- pclark 4y agoI'd probably be more wary of logs in the water than freak waves
- dieselgate 4y agoI 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
- glonq 4y agoOof, we have already bonked into enough lumber in poor visibility. Hoping that if we keep X miles offshore there's fewer logs. I've been petitioning for a bow- or mast-mounted camera for spotting debris.
- danielodievich 4y agoFor those interested in this topic, The Wave by Susan Casey https://susancasey.com/books-list/the-wave 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.
- simplotek 4y ago> the fairly recent event of 1740 foot/~550 meter tall tsunami wave This isn't exactly true. The ~550 meter height corresponds to the height up to which trees were cleared. However, the tsunami was created by a massive landslide in a contained bay, which pushed the water uphill much like someone falling in a filled tub can push water up the walls.
- kposehn 4y agoA rogue wave captured on film was in the second season of The Deadliest Catch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2KqofR05TE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2KqofR05TE
- 93po 4y agoI'm sorry but this reeks of made up bullshit for TV on a show that would be notoriously boring if not for invented drama. I'm sure they took a wave but I don't see any evidence that it was a rogue wave.
- latchkey 4y agoCruise ship a month ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Kuq9lgSyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Kuq9lgSyk
- 93po 4y agoNo footage of the actual wave, annoying
- legohead 4y agoDunno 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 4y agoThe 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.
- DrBazza 4y agoThere aren’t just rogue waves, there are rogue holes too. Imagine being in a boat and it just drops a 50ft.
- korse 4y agoI 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+Waverider.mp3 https://archive.org/details/filk_fire_in_the_sky/14+Waveride...
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoInaccurate article. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25965-7-rogue-wave-disasters-from-columbus-to-cruise-ships/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25965-7-rogue-wave-di... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rogue_waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rogue_waves
- matrix12 4y agoMore extreme than extreme.