Wandering waves, killer waves, monster waves, century-old waves … all these epithets are used to refer to the giant waves that meet in the ocean. They are so tall that they can flip an ocean liner. The height of a roving wave is at least twice the height of a normal large wave.
In the era of the great geographical discoveries, when many ships that set sail did not return, incredible stories about a mysterious natural phenomenon went for a walk in the port taverns. Yoongi, baptized by the storm, and seasoned sailors talked about a terrible and unknown force that appears on the high seas from nowhere and destroys ships in an instant. Since then, the principles of shipbuilding have changed, the controllability, stability and strength of ships have increased significantly. It used to be thought that killer waves are a myth, but recent research has proven their existence. It is estimated that the probability of such waves appearing in the ocean is 1 in 200,000.
Let's find out more about it …
For centuries, seasoned sea wolves have frightened their listeners with eerie tales of huge, mountain-high killer waves. But it is only relatively recently that oceanologists and geophysicists began to take these stories seriously and try to understand where these monsters come from and how to protect themselves from them. Mathematics and continuous space monitoring of the ocean came to the rescue.
Aivazovsky's textbook picture "The Ninth Wave" - about the victims of the elements - is probably familiar to everyone. Of course, this topic was not included in the works of the famous marine painter by chance: over many centuries of the history of navigation, folklore has overgrown with legends about giant water walls and failures.
How a killer wave overturns and sinks ships can be seen in the Hollywood disaster film The Perfect Storm, a dramatic story of a fishing schooner disappearing without a trace in the North Atlantic east of Newfoundland as a result of the collision of two powerful storm fronts. Andrea Gale”, taking the lives of fishermen with them.
According to rare eyewitnesses who managed to survive the riot of the elements, such waves often arise under quite favorable weather conditions, which, it would seem, do not portend any danger.
Reliable facts about the monstrous waves that suddenly appear on the high seas are relatively few, but nevertheless they accumulate and require explanation. Killer waves are completely different from the rest: they are 3-5 times higher in height than ordinary waves generated during a strong storm.
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For the first time, a killer wave was officially recorded on a Norwegian gas production platform (the Dropner platform) in 1995. The wave was called the "Dropner wave". Although it did not cause much damage to the platform, it was 26 meters high - twice the height of any other large wave in the region.
Roaming waves, unlike tsunamis, are usually found very far from the coast. For ocean storms, waves of 7 meters are common. If the storm is extremely strong, the waves can reach 15 meters in height. But roaming waves are not born in a storm and can reach a height of 30 meters or more (the height of a 10-storey building). Such a wave looks like a huge, almost vertical wall of water. If a ship is in the path of a wandering wave, there is almost no hope of salvation, it sinks in a matter of minutes.
Wandering waves can also appear on lakes. So, in the American lake Superior there is a phenomenon called "Three Sisters". Sometimes on the surface of the lake there are three huge waves following each other. In 1975, the warship "Edmund Fitzgerald" (222 meters long) sank precisely because of a collision with the "sisters".
As recent studies show, roaming waves are not that rare. Scientists examined data from satellites and found that many such waves appear in the ocean every year. The phenomenon of killer waves was studied even by employees of the American military laboratories DARPA, but the reason for their occurrence has not been found out.
The history of the study of killer waves
In 1840, during his expedition, the French navigator Dumont d'Urville (1792–1842) observed a giant 35-meter wave, which he reported at a meeting of the French Geographical Society. But he was laughed at: none of the pundits believed that such monsters could exist. The explosive development of shipping and yachting over the next century and a half provided ample evidence for the existence of unusual giant waves, such as that observed by d'Urville - killer waves. They are also called wandering waves, monster waves and even irregular waves. A single killer wave appears out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere before it can be detected. This is a deadly test for even the most modern ships: the surface on which a giant wave hits,can be pressurized up to 100 tons per square meter (and most modern ships can only withstand up to 15 tons). This wave is high enough to flood a 10-story building or topple a 30-meter cruise ship.
According to miraculously surviving eyewitnesses, such waves appear unexpectedly, last only a few seconds and often bring death.
… December 1942. Queen Mary. During the Second World War, this luxury liner was converted into a military transporter. Taking on board 15 thousand people, the ship was heading to England. And then a 23-meter wall of water fell on the liner. At the highest point, the Queen Mary reached about seven meters. The list of the vessel was 5 degrees from the water surface. The wave hit the Queen Mary on the side, a little more and the ship could literally turn upside down. However, Queen Mary managed to straighten up again and stand up straight. There were 15 thousand people on board.
… 1943, North Atlantic. The cruise ship Queen Elizabeth falls into a deep hollow and is subjected to two powerful wave shocks in a row, which cause serious damage to the bridge - at a height of twenty meters above the waterline.
… 1944, Indian Ocean. The British Navy cruiser "Birmingham" falls into a deep hole, after which a giant wave hits its bow. According to the commander's notes, the ship's deck, located eighteen meters above sea level, is flooded with water up to its knees.
… 1951. North Atlantic. Captain Henry Carlson sent a radiogram that a force, which he identified as a large wave, had hit his cargo ship Flying Enterprise. He didn't call it a killer wave.
Carlson simply didn’t want to be thought of as another fictional drunkard. His ship cracked in the middle: it looked like someone took a huge butcher's ax and brought it down on the ship right in the middle. Carlson and his team managed to keep the ship afloat. Carlson was a smart man and ordered the cables to be pulled on winches on both sides of the crack. When the crack became 2 cm in diameter, they filled it with concrete and built a wave diverter on it. Brilliant! The ship remained afloat, but 28 hours later another killer wave, 20 m high, hit the ship. The masts and all radio antennas broke. The ship's steel plating cracked.
The shock force of the wave was simply monstrous. It seemed like hell was opening up. 40 crew members and 10 passengers managed to escape, while Captain Carlson remained on the ship and sent radiograms. British tugs tried to take the damaged vessel more than 600 kilometers to English Falmouth, but when 60 km remained to the coast, the Flying Enterprise sank. Captain Carlson managed to escape just a few minutes before the ship sank. At home, the captain was greeted as a hero. However, Carlson chose to remain silent about the fact that his ship was the victim of two killer waves. The long denial of killer waves by scientists was partly because the captains were reluctant to admit that the ocean had conquered them. They are proud of their skills and not without reason. But then it became clear that this was not their fault:because no skill will help when meeting a monster wave.
… 1966. The elegant liner Michelangelo is sailing across the Atlantic to New York. The 275-meter handsome man is equipped with pitch stabilizers so that wealthy passengers don't spill a drop of martini. However, something happened in the ocean … When the battered Michelangelo entered the port of New York, two passengers and one crew member were dead, twelve were injured, and the bow of the ship turned into a heap of twisted steel. The team reported that a single wave more than 25 meters high hit them with incredible force. Water rushed onto the bridge and first class cabins. Everything happened literally in a matter of seconds.
… December 1978. The pride of the German merchant fleet, the supertanker "Munich" went full steam through the storm in the Atlantic. The shipbuilders assured: "Munich" is unsinkable, "the sea is knee-deep" and no storm is terrible. But it soon became clear that this was not the case. In the middle of the ocean, "Munich" suddenly sent a distress signal, and fifteen seconds later the signal disappeared. In the course of the most ambitious searches in the history of navigation, only a few wreckage of a ship and a battered boat that dangled on the waves in the middle of the ocean were found. The boat was ripped off the mooring lines and seemed to be smashed by a hammer. This meant that a force hit the ship from a height of 18 meters. The remains of 29 crew members were never found. This gave reason to believe that the ship was the victim of a killer wave. In the conclusion of the seagoing court, the cause of the unusual phenomenon was called bad weather,but not a word about what kind of phenomenon it was.
… 1980. The English dry cargo ship Derbyshire went to the bottom off the coast of Japan. As the survey showed, the vessel almost 300 meters long was destroyed by a giant wave, which broke through the main cargo hatch and flooded the hold. 44 people were killed.
… In 1980, the Russian tanker Taganrog Bay collided with a killer wave. It happened as follows. “The sea swell after 12 noon also slightly decreased and did not exceed 6 points. The course of the vessel was slowed down to the smallest, it obeyed the rudder and played well on the wave. The tank and deck were not flooded with water. Suddenly, at 01:01 pm, the bow of the vessel sank slightly, and suddenly, at the very stem at an angle of 10-15 degrees to the course of the vessel, the crest of a single wave was seen, which rose almost 5 m above the tank (the bulwark of the tank was 11 m from the water level). The comb instantly fell on the tank and covered the sailors working there (one of them died). The sailors said that the ship seemed to go down smoothly, sliding along the wave, and “buried itself” in the vertical section of its frontal part. No one felt the blowthe wave smoothly rolled over the vessel's tank, covering it with a layer of water more than 2 m thick. There was no continuation of the wave either to the right or to the left … "(from the book by I. Lavrenov" Mathematical modeling of wind waves in a spatially inhomogeneous ocean ")
Seriously, the study of killer waves began only after, in the same year, 1980, a daredevil managed to capture a killer wave during its attack on the oil tanker Esso Langbedoc. The tanker was heading home from Datura, east of the South African coast. The sea was restless, the waves reached 4.5 meters. Senior Captain Philippe Lejour stood on the bridge when a wave much higher than all others appeared out of nowhere and began to approach the ship. When the water rolled across the deck, Lejour managed to click the shutter of the camera. And this photo was the first documentary evidence of the existence of giant waves that can cover even a huge tanker. The top of the mast on the starboard side was at a height of 25 meters from the water level, so the height of the waves compared to it was determined as 30.5 meters. Esso Langbedoc suffered a crushing blowwhich shook the ship from bow to stern. “It was stormy, but not strong,” Philippe Lejour said later in an interview with the English magazine New Scientist. - Suddenly a huge wave appeared from the stern, many times higher than all the others. It covered the entire vessel, even the masts disappeared under the water. The tanker was lucky: he stayed afloat.
Now scientists had material evidence (and this was soon followed by others), they had to reconsider their views and, despite the impossibility of mathematical modeling of the process of occurrence of such waves, to admit the fact of their existence.
although there were still plenty of skeptics, nevertheless, experts kept harsh statistics: according to their calculations, from 1968 to 1994, killer waves killed about 200 ships, among them - 22 huge supertankers (and it is very difficult to destroy a supertanker); more than 600 people drowned.
It also turned out that the killer waves have nothing to do with tsunamis, which appear as a result of seismic phenomena and gain maximum height only near the coast, or with ordinary waves generated by a powerful storm. They occur not only during stormy weather, but also during weak winds and relatively little waves.
Until 2005, two ships per week were sinking, usually under very mysterious circumstances. But even more small ships (trawlers, pleasure yachts), when meeting with killer waves, simply disappear without a trace, not even having time to send a distress signal. Giant water walls as high as a fifteen-story building crushed or smashed boats. The skill of the helmsmen did not help either: if someone managed to turn around with his nose to the wave, then his fate was the same as that of the unfortunate fishermen in the movie "The Perfect Storm": the boat, trying to climb the ridge, stood upright and fell down falling into the abyss with the keel up.
… 1995, North Sea. The floating drilling rig Veslefrikk B, owned by Statoil, is seriously damaged by the giant wave. According to one of the crew members, a few minutes before the impact, he saw a wall of water.
… 1995, North Atlantic. On the way to New York, the Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship gets caught in a hurricane and receives the shock of a twenty-nine-meter wave at the bow. “It felt like we were crashing into the White Cliffs of Dover,” said Captain Ronald Warrick.
… 1998, North Atlantic. BP Amoco's Shihallion Floating Production Platform is hit by a giant wave that blows its superstructure eighteen meters above the water level.
… 2000, North Atlantic. Upon receiving a distress signal from a yacht 600 miles from the Irish port of Cork, the British cruise ship Oriana is hit by a twenty-one meter wave.
…year 2001. Passengers of the cruise ships "Bremen" and "Star of Caledonia" then said that the ships were caught in a depression between giant waves. The horizon was out of sight, and for a while they walked along the water walls that rose above the uppermost decks.
…2005 year. The cruise ship Norwegian Dawn, a huge 300-meter ship with 2,500 passengers on board, was sailing to New York from the Bahamas. Suddenly, the liner tilted sharply, and in the next seconds a giant wave hit its side, knocking out the windows of the cabins and washing everything in its path overboard. The ship was very lucky, it escaped with only minor hull damage, property washed overboard and wounded passengers.
But it's not just in the oceans that captains encounter killer waves. The North American Great Lakes are no exception. It was there that one of the most famous disasters in maritime history occurred. The Great Lakes in North America are seas of sorts, and every sailor knows this. Waves like those in the ocean are possible there. Therefore, it is not surprising that killer waves appear on the Great Lakes.
On November 10, 1975, the cargo ship Edmund Fitzerald, transporting goods for the steel industry, fell into a terrible storm on Lake Superior. With the onset of darkness, the ship had unforeseen problems: the storm disabled the radar and damaged the ship itself. Captain Ernest McSorley told the nearby ship "Arthur Andersen" that "Fitz …" was in trouble, but nothing serious. Andersen replied that two huge waves were moving in the direction of Edmund Fitzerald. Suddenly, within a few minutes, the ship disappeared with 29 crew members. During the last communication, the captain of the Fitzgerald reported that they were all right, they would cope on their own. Then the lights disappeared and the ship disappeared altogether. It is possible that the impact of two killer waves simply broke the ship in half, and it sank within a few minutes.
Six months later, the US Coast Guard discovered the wreckage of Edmund Fitzerald at the bottom of Lake Superior. It broke in half. The mangled Edmund Fitzerald lay at a depth of more than 150 meters. The Coast Guard could not say for sure what caused the sinking of the ship, but scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered killer waves in the Great Lakes region. And Whitefishpoint, where Edmund Fitzerald was found, is where killer waves could well have arisen.
Killer waves have been the subject of attention for many international organizations dealing with the safety of ships and offshore structures, such as the International Association of Classification Societies.
The technical norms and safety standards developed by these organizations are, as a rule, advisory in nature for the relevant national institutions. However, in recent years, some national organizations have been revising their approaches to safety at sea and are moving from “most likely hazard” standards to “possible risk” standards.
Usually a rogue wave is described as a rapidly approaching wall of water of great height. In front of it, there is a depression several meters deep - a "hole in the sea". Wave height is usually indicated precisely as the distance from the highest point of the crest to the lowest point of the trough. By their appearance, killer waves are divided into three main types: "white wall", "three sisters", "single tower".
"Three sisters" - this is when three giant waves following one after another, having risen on which supertankers break under their own weight. "Three sisters" arise when sea currents collide: most often such waves appear at the Cape of Good Hope (the southern tip of Africa), where warm and cold streams join.
According to the observations of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), rogue waves are scattering and non-scattering. The latter are able to travel quite a long way by sea: from six to ten miles. If the ship notices a wave from afar, you can have time to take some measures. The scattering ones appear literally out of nowhere, collapse and disappear. And not only ships became their prey …
Storms in the North Atlantic are some of the worst in the world. The strength of the ocean here is such that the wall of water here is no softer than concrete … This time, a killer wave of incredible strength and height of a 35-storey building hit the Ocean Ranger oil platform, which was located in the area of the Newfoundland Bank (bank - an elevated area bottom). This tragedy is still remembered in Newfoundland. Because the power of one single wave was enough to overturn a huge platform and take so many lives at once …
On February 14, 1982, a wave approximately 27.5 meters high squeezed out the windows of the control center on the Ocean Ranger. Water flooded the control panel and all computer systems; the ballast tanks that stabilized the platform failed and it capsized. As a result, all 84 drilling workers were killed. This was the most tragic outcome of the encounter with the killer wave. But Ocean Ranger at that time was the largest and most modern drilling platform for which 12-meter waves were just a little excitement. And this is far from an isolated case. But even with such evidence, scientists questioned the real size of the killer waves. Only in 1995, as a result of a strike on another oil platform, the first reliable evidence of the power of such a wave was obtained.
… Drilling platform "Dropner" was in the North Sea between Norway and Scotland. On the first day of the new year, the platform was precipitated by 10-meter waves, and this was nothing unusual. Suddenly, at a speed of over 70 km / h, a wave hit the platform 3 times more than usual. When the wave struck, a laser mounted on the platform recorded an accurate reading of this monster. The crest of the wave was at a height of more than 27 meters. This data was a big step forward. Since the nature of the damage to the equipment corresponded to the indicated wave height, the scientific world recognized the existence of killer waves, as well as the fact that the story of their size was not at all the fairy tales of unlucky sailors.
Wave mechanics
Particles of water, due to their great mobility, easily go out of balance under the influence of various forces and make oscillatory movements. The reasons for the appearance of waves can be the tidal forces of the Moon and the Sun, wind, fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, underwater earthquakes or bottom deformations. Wind waves are generated by wind energy transmitted by direct air pressure to the windward slopes of the ridges and friction against the water surface.
The nature of the formation of waves on the water surface was well studied, modeled and described by European scientists in the first half of the 19th century. Even then, it was clear that with a wind of more than two points (a speed of more than four knots), air currents transfer energy to the sea ripples, which is quite sufficient for the formation of real waves and swell.
If the wind does not subside, the excitement gradually increases, since the oscillatory movements of the water receive additional energy from the outside. In this case, the wave height depends not only on the wind speed, but also on the duration of its impact, as well as on the depth and area of open water.
Reference books and encyclopedias show the wave heights characteristic of different oceans. Thus, the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary reports that the largest waves are found in the area of the western winds of the Indian Ocean (11.5 m) and in the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean (7.5 m). Once, such waves were observed near the Azores (15 m) and in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America (14 m).
When a wave coming from the open sea wedges out with a raised bottom, a surf or breaker occurs. On the west coast of equatorial Africa and near Madras in India, surf waves sometimes reach 22 meters in height.
Some ocean scientists deny the existence of huge killer waves on the high seas, believing that the objective picture is distorted in the eyes of frightened eyewitnesses. Due to the depression, which always goes in front of the wave, a special perception effect arises, which is further enhanced by the fact that the ship is not horizontal, that is, parallel to the wave's base, but is inclined towards it. As a result, the wave height can be greatly exaggerated.
Nevertheless, the constantly accumulating facts prove the opposite. It is known that different waves can interact, causing an increase and decrease in excitement. The superposition of two coherent waves produces a wave whose height is equal to the sum of the heights of the individual waves. This phenomenon is called interference.
It is by interference that scientists explain the appearance of unusually high waves in some parts of the ocean. They are found at the "junction" of the waves of the Atlantic and Indian oceans - at the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost point of the African continent, and at Cape Agulhas. Here the met waves begin to pile up one on top of the other, generating huge shafts. Sailors call them "caprollers" (from the English words sare - cape and roller - shaft, big wave), and oceanographers call them solitary or episodic waves. Cape Rollers destroy both small vessels and huge tankers, sports yachts and bulk carriers, passenger liners. Apparently, it was precisely because of such a wave that the Soviet transport ship Taganrog Bay in 1985 crashed off the eastern coast of South Africa.
Cape Rollers arise not only off the southern tip of Africa, but also in the areas of the Newfoundland Bank, Bermuda, Cape Horn, on the outskirts of the Norwegian shelf and even off the coast of Greece
If two interfering waves meet any obstacle on their way - a shoal, reefs, an island or a coast - the pinching-out generates a new wave, much higher in height than its "parents". Due to the reflection of waves from various obstacles as a result of the superposition of the reflected wave on a straight line, so-called standing waves can arise. Unlike a traveling wave, there is no energy flow in a standing wave. Different sections of such a wave oscillate in the same phase, but with different amplitudes.
Interfering with each other, air currents and sea currents can collide, and then their energy is summed up in the form of waves. This is why superwaves can be found in the Gulf Stream, Kuroshio and other powerful ocean currents.
Near the infamous Cape Horn, the same thing is happening: the fast currents collide with opposing winds.
However, the mechanisms of interference cannot provide an exhaustive explanation of the causes of the appearance of giant waves.
Lone killers
In solving the secrets of giant waves, physicists and mathematicians came to the aid of oceanographers. Efim Pelinovsky studied and described the mechanism of the appearance of solitary stationary waves, which are called solitons (from solitary wave - solitary wave). The main feature of solitons is that these single waves do not change their shape during propagation, even when interacting with their own kind. Such waves can travel very long distances without losing their energy.
The water column in the ocean is very complex. The ocean is heterogeneous vertically: there are layers of different densities, in each of which internal waves can arise and propagate, reaching heights of 100 meters or more. Pelinovsky believes that solitons also exist in the inner layers of the ocean, and is actively engaged in their research and forecasting.
Large scale atmospheric forcings - cyclones and anticyclones - lead to an increase or decrease in the ocean surface in areas of low and high pressure. This relationship is called the law of the inverse barometer. A decrease in atmospheric pressure by only 1 mm Hg can cause an increase in the ocean level in this place by 13 mm. If the pressure drops by tens of millimeters, which often happens during typhoons, then a height of meters or tens of meters appears on the ocean surface, which, spreading, can generate a giant wave. Pressure drops can lead to resonance phenomena, which are the reason for the generation of huge waves in the ocean.
Mathematical modeling of sea waves is carried out today in many countries of the world, scientists offer solutions that are very different from each other, describing different types of giant waves in different ways.
Of course, mathematical models are created not only to explain the nature of waves. Scientists set themselves a very specific goal - to learn how to save ships and oil and gas facilities on the shelf from death. And most importantly, people's lives.
Scientific research has shown that, on average, one of the 23 waves is significantly superior in terms of its parameters. Statistics show that one solitary wave, three times superior in its parameters to the usual one, falls on 1175 waves, and a fourfold excess occurs in one wave out of 300 thousand normal ones. However, statistics, unfortunately, do not allow predicting the appearance of a rogue wave.
Recent observations by scientists prove that giant waves are not uncommon, and their existence should be taken into account when designing ships. The University of Glasgow has compiled a catalog of recent maritime disasters caused by killer waves. Of the 60 super-large ships that sank between 1969 and 1994, 22 cargo ships over 200 meters in length were the victims of giant waves. They broke through the main cargo hatch and flooded the main hold. In these shipwrecks, 542 people died. Oilmen are also in great danger, as production is gradually moving to the ocean shelf, and the existence of giant killer waves was clearly not taken into account when designing current offshore platforms and floating drilling rigs.
In 2000, the European Union initiated the launch of an interethnic killer wave research project called MaxWave. And soon, with the help of two satellites, the European Space Agency began to monitor the ocean. In just the first three weeks of operation, satellites recorded a dozen killer waves with a height of about 30 meters! In addition, it turned out that rogue waves occur in the ocean every two days. It is clear that this is the average temperature in the hospital, but still it is better than nothing. Or what happened before. For example, analysis of radar data from the Goma oil platform in the North Sea showed that over 12 years, 466 rogue waves were recorded in the available field of view. Outdated theories of wave formation showed that the appearance of a rogue wave in this region could happen once every ten thousand years! Wow, "margin of error"?
The conclusion that rogue waves are much more common in the ocean than previously thought by the European Space Agency (ESA) and confirmed by independent measurements of waves in the South Atlantic could radically change the approach to safety standards for the construction and operation of offshore oil platforms. and tankers. According to the well-known Norwegian expert S. Haver, the height of the killer wave can be 10-20% higher than the threshold set by the statistical data on waves, which is taken into account when building oil platforms. The authoritative British expert in the field of shipbuilding D. Faulkner spoke out even more categorically, arguing that the criteria for the extreme height of a linear wave of 10, often used in the construction of ships,75 m and a maximum load of 26-60 kN / mm2 are completely inadequate and do not provide safety at sea in the presence of catastrophic waves.
The practical side of the study of this natural phenomenon is quite obvious. The study of their properties will make it possible to make adjustments to the designs of sea liners under construction, which is necessary due to the ever-increasing accidents of tankers and the resulting environmental disasters. If such huge waves exist, then one must be able to resist them.
But for now, these waves continue to pose a threat to ships.