The Wave, Susan Casey
Thanks to Dave and Marilee Anderson for this great
book. What a captivating treatment of
such a fascinating topic. I was amazed
by the numbers of large ships that sink each year and the lack of public outcry
or attention.
The large waves begin may be the toys of the super surfers
she describes, but the real freaks are more common that we ever thought
possible as well as being larger. The
danger of 100 foot walls of water that can crash down with such force that a
mere 18 inch wave can topple a wall built to withstand 125 mph winds is a
reminder of how much force there is.
This book was written before the latest Japenese Sunami and
Earthquake and still it captures the frightening and awesome aspects of waves
in a way that made it hard for me to put the book down.
Casey focuses on the super surfers, the men who will travel
the world looking for the largest waves in storm tossed sees, on rocky coves –
an obsession that fits well with her exploration of waves. She balances it out with the scientists, the
shippers, the tragedies, but uses them to draw attention to the drama and
tragedy, constantly going back to the wave riders because of the beauty and the
fascination.
Check out the notes and videos below:
The Wave: In Pursuit
of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean
The
Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean
From
Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Devil’s
Teeth,
an astonishing book about colossal, ship-swallowing rogue waves and the surfers
who seek them out.
For
centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or
taller. Until recently scientists dismissed these stories—waves that high
would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a
startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers
realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters. They found their
proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex
of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached
100 feet.
As
scientists scramble to understand this phenomenon, others view the giant waves
as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers who fly around the world
trying to ride the ocean’s most destructive monsters. The pioneer of extreme
surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in
Hawaii, figured out how to board suicidally large waves of 70 and 80 feet.
Casey follows this unique tribe of people as they seek to conquer the holy
grail of their sport, a 100-foot wave.
In
this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are
juxtaposed against scientists’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive
powers of waves—from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific
in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.
Like
Jon Krakauer’s Into
Thin Air, The Wave brilliantly portrays human beings confronting
nature at its most ferocious.
Giant waves breaking on
the deck of the oil freighter Esso LanguedocFor centuries sailors have
been telling stories of encountering monstrous ocean waves which tower over one
hundred feet in the air and toss ships about like corks. Historically
oceanographers have discounted these reports as tall tales– the embellished
stories of mariners with too much time at sea. But in the last eleven years
scientists have discovered strong evidence indicating that such massive rogue
waves do exist. The phenomenon has become the subject of recent scientific
study, but their origin remains a mystery of the deep.
About one ship is lost every week in the world’s oceans, mostly due to poor
seamanship or severe weather. But it now seems likely that at least a small
percentage of sea disappearances are due to encounters with these destructive
waves. Over the years experienced captains have made very credible reports of
meeting behemoth waves which appear spontaneously, cause extensive damage to
their ships, and shrug back into the sea just as mysteriously as they had
appeared. One account describes the appearance of a giant wave trough which
onlookers likened to a “hole in the sea”, followed by a twelve-story-tall “wall
of water.” To further compound the mystery, some such waves have been said to
appear mid-ocean, and often in calm weather.
On the open sea, waves can commonly reach seven meters in height; or even up to
fifteen in extreme weather. In contrast, some reported rogue waves have
exceeded thirty meters in height. Curiously, rogue waves are often seen
traveling against the prevailing current and wave directions; and unlike a tsunami,
rogue waves are localized and very short-lived. Most modern merchant vessels
are designed to withstand about fifteen tons of pressure per square meter, but
these unusual waves exert a pressure of about one hundred tons per square
meter. Needless to say, a rogue wave means big trouble for any ship it meets.
Encounters with rogue waves have been rare
but memorable. In 1933 in the North Pacific, the US Navy transport
USS
Ramapo triangulated a rogue wave at thirty-four meters in height. In 1942,
the
RMS Queen Mary was transporting 15,000 US troops to Europe when it
was hit by a twenty-three meter wave and nearly capsized. The giant vessel
listed by about 52 degrees due to the impact, after which it slowly righted
itself.
In 1978, the 37,000-ton
MS Munchen radioed a garbled distress call
from the mid-Atlantic. When rescuers arrived, they found only “a few bits of
wreckage,” including an unlaunched lifeboat with one of its attachment pins
“twisted as though hit by an extreme force.” It is now believed that a rogue
wave hit the ship, causing it to capsize and sink. No survivors were ever
found.
In 1996, the
Queen Elizabeth 2 encountered a rogue wave of
twenty-nine meters, which the Captain said “came out of the darkness” and
“looked like the White Cliffs of Dover.” London newspapers said that the
captain situated the vessel to “surf” the wave to avoid being sunk.
Despite these and other encounters with rogue waves, scientists long
rejected such claims as unlikely. Anecdotal evidence is often unreliable, so
researchers used computer modelling to predict the likelihood of such massive
waves. Oceanographers’ findings indicated that waves higher than fifteen meters
were probably very rare events, occurring perhaps once in 10,000 years. That
all changed in 1995 when a freak wave hit the Draupner North Sea oil platform.
The oil rig swayed a little, suffering minor damage, but its onboard measuring
equipment successfully recorded the wave height at nineteen meters.
More recently, satellite photos and radar
imagery have documented the existence of numerous rogue waves, and it turns out
that they are far more common than previously thought. During a three-week
study in 2001, radar scanning detected ten monster waves in a 1.5 million
square kilometer area. Satellites and direct observations have also established
that rogue waves can happen anywhere, but they are most numerous in the North
Atlantic and off the western shore of South Africa. In spite of their
frequency, monster waves rarely meet with sea vessels because they are so
short-lived.
The cause of rogue waves is still an area of active research. One theory
under investigation cites “constructive interference,” which is a result of
several smaller waves overlapping in phase, combining to produce one massive
wave. Another working hypothesis is based on the “non-linear Schrödinger
effect,” in which energy is “soaked up” from neighboring waves to create a
monster wave. Still other researchers are looking into the possibility that
wave energy is being focused by the surrounding environments, or that wind
action on the surface is amplifying existing effects.
Science is necessarily skeptical of things which are beyond our observation,
but now that rogue waves are a measurable phenomenon they have been officially
upgraded from legend to reality. This recent finding is very telling about how
little we really know about our world’s oceans, and how many secrets the sea
must still hold.
http://www.damninteresting.com/monster-rogue-waves
