Thought for centuries to be just another 'myth of the seafaring world', turns out they are real and we may be on path to understand them. Also, some hint here on how they form and might be predicted.
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Each leviathan of the deep has a signature that can be used to forecast it
On New Year’s Day in 1995, an 80-foot wall of water hammered into a gas platform off the coast of Norway in the North Sea. As with most rogue waves, it rolled through the open ocean unaccompanied and under the radar. It was a singular monster. No other waves of its size followed, and no warning preceded its impressive crest. Named the Draupner wave after the gas platform it struck, it became the first scientifically confirmed rogue wave in history, corroborating hundreds of years of maritime lore.
“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” said Francesco Fedele, an engineering professor at Georgia, in a statement. “For a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”
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Scientists have generally assumed extraordinary forces must drive such extraordinary waves, and have gone to great lengths to identify these forces. But Fedele and a team of researchers studied 18 years of data from the North Sea and discovered that, in fact, two natural ocean wave processes conspire to generate rogue waves. First, several large waves line up and amplify each other. Second, natural wave effects stretch the shape in a nonlinear way, increasing the size by an additional 15 to 20 percent. Together, these two processes can produce a single massive mountain of water.
According to Fedele, rogue waves result from natural ocean dynamics—they are not exceptions to them. “This is the most definitive, real-world evidence to date,” added Fedele, who has long been skeptical of traditional explanations for rogue waves ...
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nautil.us
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Each leviathan of the deep has a signature that can be used to forecast it
On New Year’s Day in 1995, an 80-foot wall of water hammered into a gas platform off the coast of Norway in the North Sea. As with most rogue waves, it rolled through the open ocean unaccompanied and under the radar. It was a singular monster. No other waves of its size followed, and no warning preceded its impressive crest. Named the Draupner wave after the gas platform it struck, it became the first scientifically confirmed rogue wave in history, corroborating hundreds of years of maritime lore.
“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” said Francesco Fedele, an engineering professor at Georgia, in a statement. “For a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”
....
Scientists have generally assumed extraordinary forces must drive such extraordinary waves, and have gone to great lengths to identify these forces. But Fedele and a team of researchers studied 18 years of data from the North Sea and discovered that, in fact, two natural ocean wave processes conspire to generate rogue waves. First, several large waves line up and amplify each other. Second, natural wave effects stretch the shape in a nonlinear way, increasing the size by an additional 15 to 20 percent. Together, these two processes can produce a single massive mountain of water.
According to Fedele, rogue waves result from natural ocean dynamics—they are not exceptions to them. “This is the most definitive, real-world evidence to date,” added Fedele, who has long been skeptical of traditional explanations for rogue waves ...
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Rogue Wave Mystery Solved
Rogue Wave Mystery Solved: Each rouge wave—which usually roll through the open ocean under the radar—has a signature that can forecast it.
nautil.us
