Posted on 08/04/2008 10:23:27 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Secret to Towering Rogue Waves Revealed
Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Mon Aug 4, 11:41 AM ET
Deadly rogue waves 100 feet tall or higher could suddenly rise seemingly out of nowhere from the ocean, research now reveals.
Understanding how such monstrous waves form could lead to ways to predict when they might emerge or, potentially, even drive them at enemy vessels, scientists added.
For centuries these killer waves had been dismissed as myths - towering walls of water blamed for mysterious disappearances of ships. But on New Year's Day on 1995, a wave that reached more than 80 feet high was detected with scientific instruments at an oil platform in the North Sea, confirming the existence of these legends.
Since then, the European Union initiated Project MaxWave, which relied on imagery from European Space Agency radar satellites to spot what appeared to be rogue waves around the world. Now scientists are trying to uncover what causes these monsters.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping!
Not a new idea for some of us—but sounds like they now have good observations to back it. Good news!
Secret to Towering Rogue Waves Revealed...Manmade Global Warming! /sarc/
The reason that rogue waves form has been settled science for at least the last 50 years.
This is not controversial; neither have rogue waves been considered “myths”, at least not be knowledgeable people during my lifetime. They are a perfectly natural occurrence at sea.
Consider that there are thousands of waves forming and dissapating in the oceans, of all different wavelengths, amplitude, and directionality. From time to time and place to place these waves will overtake, cross and interact with one another, as all sorts of propagating waves will do.
From time to time two or several waves strongly reinforce one another and form a towering “rogue” wave. It is and always has been a statistical certainty in the world ocean that this will occur.
Gee, you’d think that with all the FReeper Navy vets we have, you would have heard something about this things before.
Ping
There were a series of articles posted here three or four years ago when this subject piqued the public’s interest. The FR Salts had some interesting tales.
Probably more like a soliton, like a tidal bore, rather than a random constructive wave interference phenomenon. A soliton can persist for a lot longer than a random interference node. Quite an interesting thing.
There has been an excellent Discovery Channel program on this subject in the last couple or three years. The Oil rig measurements in fact provided validation for a theory by a Prof. at (IIRC) U. Arizona. Since then rogue waves have been spotted on satellite imagery and are in fact not all that uncommon.
Is this what might be in the Bermuda Triangle? If these exist, why go on a cruise?
Yeah, but now that you've mentioned it Pelosi won't allow a vote on the energy bill unless there's a couple hundred million in there for it.
There’s nothing new about the idea of “rogue” waves. The oceans are a palette of wave patterns. Every now and then the patterns, especially with regard to storm systems, will let a wave stack up that’s massively out of scale.
It happens. It’s always happened.
There are far more ships that sink mysteriously outside of the "Bermuda Triangle" than within it. The only mysterious thing about the "Bermuda Triangle" is why it seems to sell so many books.
ping for the AM
I’ve seen that view from the top of the bridge of the CGC Polar Sea about to dive into a wave that was probly 100 or so feet high. The flybridge is 80 feet off the water. I know I’ve looked UP at the top of waves ahead.
I know, too, what it feels like to take green water over the top of the bridge, 80 feet up.
:-)
Actually the rogue wave occurs in open ocean, and is very much an interference phenomenon. They are of exceeding short duration. They collapse almost immediately and do not propagate.
You just don’t want to be sitting or sailing on the face of one when it rises up.
Now, there are some who associate an increased probablilty of the appearnace of these giant waves with the presence of seamounts - not banks or reefs, but fairly deep seamounts. I can’t entirely discount this, but it does seem that the depth of water over the seamount would need to be less than the wavelength of the ocean wave to shorten the wavelength and increase the amplitude of the wave at the surface.
Wow! They’ve rediscovered the principle of superposition!
What a relief. Kids with jump ropes in playgrounds must have lost it somehow.
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