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National Data Buoy Center, NWS link       Station 42040 - MOBILE SOUTH 64 nm South of Dauphin Island, AL     50.5   Wind speed    62.2  Peak gust   42.0  Wave height   You can watch the weather in the 10 nearest buoys to Ivan:   http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/radial_search.php?lat1=27.3N&lon1=88.0W&dist=350&time=3      

Dashing RoguesFreak ocean waves pose threat to ships, deep-sea oil platforms Sid Perkins In February 1933, the Navy tanker USS Ramapo was steaming its way from the Philippines to San Diego in the midst of an exceptionally strong storm. The 146-meter-long ship was buffeted by near-hurricane–force winds. Early on the morning of Feb. 7, a wave far larger than the others surrounding the ship overtook the Ramapo from behind. New mathematical analyses, backed up by satellite data, hint that dangerous rogue waves are more common than scientists previously recognized. In this archive photo from the National Weather Service, a merchant...

Hurricane caused 'tallest wave' Satellite image of Hurricane Ivan south of western Cuba Hurricane Ivan generated a wave more than 90 foot (27 metres) high - thought to be the tallest and most intense ever measured - scientists have revealed.It would have dwarfed a 10-storey building and had the power to snap a ship in half - but never reached land. The wave was recorded by sensors on the ocean floor as Hurricane Ivan passed over the Gulf of Mexico last September. The observations suggest prior estimates for extreme waves are too low, researchers warn in Science. Hurricane Ivan...

The reason that the ocean floor, especially the southern hemisphere oceans, is so poorly charted is that electromagnetic waves cannot penetrate the deep ocean (3-5 km = 2-3 mi). Instead, depths are commonly measured by timing the two-way travel time of an acoustic pulse. However because research vessels travel quite slowly (6m/s = 12 knots) it would take approximately 125 years to chart the ocean basins using the latest swath-mapping tools. To date, only a small fraction of the sea floor has been charted by ships. Fortunately, such a major mapping program is largely unnecessary because the ocean surface has...

Villagers talked of tsunami-type waves sweeping up 30 metre cliffs, chasing them out of their houses and into the bush, and they grieved at the loss of their museum with its artifacts – their taonga – and their trust in the beautiful but treacherous sea below... Worst hit was the southern area of Aliluki where the terrifying monstrous waves, rather than the wind, caused devastation... Moto Valiana said he had made his sister leave her Kristof home just minutes before it was swamped by a gigantic wave... Across the road, Osa Williams spoke of how she thought her house was...

Scientists traveled to the Aleutian Chain last summer to check out a colossal submarine landslide blamed for one of the most devastating tsunamis of the 20th century. They wanted to find out how sea-floor life responded to such a huge disturbance and produce detailed charts. What they got was a shock of seismic proportions. Instead of a 12-mile-wide avalanche dropping 30 to 40 miles down the continental slope into the abyss of the Aleutian Trench, sonar surveys and the remotely operated underwater vehicle Jason II found regular ocean bottom, eroded and crusty and largely undisturbed. There was no slide. And...

It appears that massive ship-sinking ocean waves - as high as 10-storey buildings - are far more common than scientists previously thought. Oceanographers' conventional wisdom was that waves over 25 metres only occurred once every 10,000 years. However, the European Space Agency says satellite data it collected over only three weeks in 2001 found more than 10 individual waves around the globe that swelled to more than 25 metres in height. The news is significant because current ships and off-shore platforms are only built to withstand maximum wave heights of 15 metres. Over the past two decades more than 200...

PARIS (AFP) - European satellites have given confirmation to terrified mariners who describe seeing freak waves as tall as 10-storey buildings, the European Space Agency (ESA) said. "Rogue waves" have been the anecdotal cause behind scores of sinkings of vessels as large as container ships and supertankers over the past two decades. But evidence to support this has been sketchy, and many marine scientists have clung to statistical models that say monstrous deviations from the normal sea state only occur once every thousand years. Testing this promise, ESA tasked two of its Earth-scanning satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to monitor the...

Rare photo of a rogue wave Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites 21 July 2004Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.   Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such...

Earlier today, MetOcean Solutions' wave buoy in the Southern Ocean recorded a whopping 19.4 m wave. Senior Oceanographer Dr Tom Durrant is thrilled. "This is one of the largest waves recorded in the Southern Hemisphere," he explains. "This is the world's southern-most wave buoy moored in the open ocean, and we are excited to put it to the test in large seas."

According the the US Government's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), some type of "event" in the ocean off the New Jersey coast triggered a Tsunami Buoy! The buoy recorded sudden changes in water depth of fifty-five METERS (180 feet) in a matter of seconds.

A new discovery has revived an old theory about ocean water gobbling up ships in the Bermuda Triangle—if, that is, the Bermuda Triangle even exists. Researchers from the Arctic University of Norway say they’ve spotted large craters apparently created by methane buildups off Norway’s coast, Atlas Obscura reports. “Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea … and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” they tell the Sunday Times. “The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic.”...

Source: University of Chicago Press Journals Date: April 30, 2007 Was Bristol Channel Hit By A Tsunami? Science Daily — On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Britain's largest natural disaster, the author of Tsunami: The Underrated Hazard, reveals strong new evidence that the Bristol Channel was devastated by a tsunami on January 30, 1607. On that day, historical accounts describe a storm in the Bristol Channel, flooding more then 500 km2 of lowland and killing 2,000 people. "Despite the recent Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, tsunamis along most coastlines are currently viewed as an underrated hazard," write Edward...

Alan E Hayden, the director of more than 200 medieval excavations in Ireland, believes the grouping of islands off the Kerry coast suggests earthquake and tsunami wave style damage... The Times report adds: "A folk tale collected by a teacher in the early part of the last century offers an explanation for local place names connected to a road that ran from Dolus Head through the islands to Skellig. "The road, a pre-medieval structure, is called Bóthar na Scairte, or road of the cataclysm, and it is traceable for some distance on Valentia. In the folk tale the road and...

Archeologists have uncovered evidence of pre-farming people living in the Burren more than 6,000 years ago -- one of the oldest habitations ever unearthed in Ireland. Radiocarbon dating of a shellfish midden on Fanore Beach in north Clare have revealed it to be at least 6,000 years old -- hundreds of years older than the nearby Poulnabrone dolmen. The midden -- a cooking area where nomad hunter-gatherers boiled or roasted shellfish -- contained Stone Age implements, including two axes and a number of smaller stone tools... The midden was discovered by local woman Elaine O'Malley in 2009 and a major...

According to the "Annals of the Four Masters" the island was once called Fitha Island and it formed part of the mainland until the day "the sea swelled so high that it burst its boundaries, overflowing a large tract of country, and drowning over 1,000 persons." This happened on March 16th, 804. Some reports describe it as an earthquake, others as a tidal wave when "the sea divided the island of Fitha into three parts." These three islands are Mutton Island, Inismattle (or Illanwattle) and Roanshee (or Carrig na Ron). There is a fourth island in the area called Carraig...

A "freak wave" more than 70 feet high slammed a luxury cruise ship steaming for New York yesterday, flooding cabins, injuring passengers and forcing the liner to stop for emergency repairs. The Norwegian Dawn, an opulent ocean liner almost 1,000 feet long, limped into Charleston, S.C., yesterday afternoon after it hit vicious seas in an overnight storm off Florida - then was creamed by the rogue wave after dawn. "[My room] was destroyed by stuff getting thrown all over the place," passenger James Fraley, of Keansburg, N.J., told NBC News before embarking on the 12-hour drive home because he didn't...

Ship-sinking monster waves revealed by ESA satellites   Rare photo of a rogue wave     21 July 2004  Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA's ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these 'rogue' waves and are now being used to study their origins.  Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major...

Call to tighten safety design as scientists admit to being baffled by deadly 100ft rogue waves They are the stuff of legend and maritime myth: giant waves, taller than tower-blocks, that rise out of calm seas and destroy everything in their paths. For years scientists and marine experts have dismissed such stories as superstition. Walls of water do not rise out of the blue, they said. But now research has revealed that 'killer waves' do exist and regularly devastate ships around the world. They defy all scientific understanding and no craft is capable of withstanding their impact. 'Rogue waves in...

GERMAN scientists claim to have explained the mystery behind so-called monster waves - the term given by oceanographers for near-vertical breaking seas up to 120ft high. Such seas are thought to have sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships without trace during the past two decades. Often dismissed as sailors' yarns, monster waves have terrified seafarers for centuries and provided the raw material for countless novels and films including Sebastian Junger's recent best-seller The Perfect Storm. Yet until now scientists and oceanographers had been unable to determine exactly what formed such gigantic "one-off" seas that are capable of breaking ...