Experienced sailors who plowed the seas and oceans at different times, more than once talked about the flying Dutchmen, gigantic snakes and octopuses, insidious mermaids and sirens, and also about giant waves that emerged from nowhere and rose up like a wall to the sky.
Gone by the water shaft
These mysterious killer waves, which were on a par with sirens and mermaids, have long been considered fairy tales. The sailors who spoke about them were not believed until the 20th century.
This is not surprising - after all, after a collision with such a wave, three to four times higher than normal waves, not a single ship and not a single person from it survived. So there were no witnesses. Those who talked about the terrible wave saw it only from the side, and therefore could be considered lucky and … notorious liars.
So, in 1840, the French explorer Dumont d'Urville observed with his own eyes a huge wave 35 meters high rolling across the ocean. He spoke about this in detail at a meeting of his native French Geographical Society. But instead of thinking, his colleagues simply ridiculed him: none of them believed that the water in the ocean could rise so incredibly high, and even against the background of relatively calm waters.
It wasn't until 1933 that the first documented evidence emerged that giant killer waves were not fiction at all. On February 7, 1933, the US Navy ship Rampo collided with such a wave amid the rather calm waters of the Pacific Ocean. A huge water wall 34 meters high, rushing at a speed of approximately 85 km / h, appeared among the ocean almost out of thin air and fell on unsuspecting sailors. Few survived …
But the ship itself remained afloat, and the testimonies of the surviving eyewitnesses confirmed the old stories of other sailors: giant killer waves really exist.
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The assassination attempt on Queen Mary
Doubts remained even in the case of the Queen Mary. In 1942, a huge ocean liner, converted into a military transport, transported almost 15 thousand people to England. Suddenly, a lone wave 23 meters high rose in the ocean and hit the ship with all its might. It is fortunate for the "Queen Mary" that the blow of the water monster came on board and that it was the only one - the ship tilted critically, but managed to level off.
Everything worked out, but even numerous eyewitnesses could not fully convince the public that they almost became a victim of an elusive killer wave.
Only in 1995, the killer wave was officially recorded with instruments. A lone wave 26 meters high nearly overturned the Norwegian Dropner gas platform in the North Sea. Therefore, it went down in history as the "Dropner wave" - the obvious was eventually recognized.
The official recognition of the existence of gigantic killer waves forced to reconsider the history of sea wrecks and mysterious disappearances of ships. It is likely that many of the ships that have vanished without a trace have become victims of the killer waves.
According to new data, in just 30 years, from 1968 to 1994, these killer waves emerging from nowhere sank about 200 ships that had a length of more than 200 meters, including 22 huge "unsinkable" supertankers. In the depths of the sea as a result of these crashes, more than 600 people perished without a trace.
And how many such wrecks have occurred in the entire history of navigation? It's scary to think …
What is a killer wave? Those who saw her live always describe the same thing: a suddenly emerging and rapidly approaching almost vertical wall of water of a terrifying height, almost from a ten-story building, from 20 to 30 meters.
Before such a wave there is always an impressive depression (it is also called a "hole in the sea"). By the way, the height of the rogue wave is usually defined precisely as the distance from the highest point of the crest to the lowest point of the "hole".
Sometimes skeptics say that the killer waves are actually much lower, just the ships fall into the "hole" and it seems to them from below that the wave height is much higher than it actually is. However, there is growing evidence that waves over 30 meters in height are by no means an optical illusion.
Killer waves are not like ordinary waves - even in a storm, the highest classical waves reach a maximum of 15-17 meters, which, of course, is also terrible, but not so much.
And the killer waves are not tsunamis at all, they arise in a completely different way and their height is taken only at the very coast, and in the open ocean their size is no larger than ordinary waves. And, fortunately, tsunami does not have such a terrible height.
The main danger is absolute surprise
The peculiarity of killer waves is that they are not at all the product of a storm and appear under normal and even favorable weather conditions, although their appearance in a storm is doubly dangerous. And the main danger is absolute surprise. Their "attack" lasts for seconds, and then they disappear, no one knows how and where.
Typically, the killer wave is a loner. It is not preceded by other waves, and there are usually no repeated huge waves after it either, unless you get what researchers call "three sisters" - when there are three huge waves in a row.
In general, now researchers of rogue waves are trying to create their classification. Among them, one can now distinguish the aforementioned "three sisters", the "white wall" - a completely vertical shaft of water, and the "solitary tower" - a huge lonely wave.
All of them pose a terrible danger to any ships: a grandiose wave hits the ship with a pressure of up to 100 tons per square meter (and the vast majority of modern ships are designed for a pressure of only 15 tons). From the impact, most of them immediately turn over and go to the bottom. But it happens, especially with the "three sisters", ships "take off" on the crest of such a wave, which is also very, very bad - on this crest, even powerful supertankers in a matter of seconds easily break in half and sink in a few seconds.
Killer waves are also usually divided into scattering and non-scattering. It is the first ones that arise out of nowhere, swiftly and suddenly, forcefully fall on whatever gets in their way, and then also rapidly disappear. The latter are more predictable - they usually gain altitude gradually, their path can be traced from six to ten miles.
And what happens when such a wave rolls over the ship, you can learn from the testimony of surviving eyewitnesses. In particular, in the book by I. Lavrenov "Mathematical modeling of wind waves in a spatially inhomogeneous ocean", the collision of the Soviet tanker "Taganrog Bay" with a giant wave, which happened in 1980, is described in this way: 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 13 hours 01 minutes. the bow of the vessel dropped 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, as it were, went down smoothly, sliding along the wave, and “buried itself” in the vertical section of its frontal part. Nobody felt the impact, the 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."
In a high-risk area
Modern research has discovered a terrible truth: roaming waves of unthinkable heights are a fairly common occurrence. Recently, within the framework of the Maximum Wave project, which monitors the surface of the world's oceans using radar satellites, in just three weeks more than ten huge single waves were recorded around the globe, whose height reached 25 meters and higher.
The turbulent North Atlantic is a prime meeting place for roaming killer waves. One of the worst tragedies occurred in 1982, when a killer wave, the height of a 35-story building, hit the Ocean Ranger oil platform in the Newfoundland Bank area. As a result of this disaster, all the people who worked on it died, the huge platform itself weighing 25 thousand tons was completely destroyed.
And in 1985, on the Irish lighthouse Fastnet Rock, located on the island of the same name in the Atlantic Ocean, almost the most record killer wave with a height of 48 meters hit!
Areas of increased danger are also the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific Ocean near Japan and the Gulf Stream along the eastern coast of North America, the famous Cape of Good Hope, located, as you know, near the southern tip of Africa, the North Sea (it was there that the "Dropner wave" was recorded) and the nearest areas, Indian Ocean. Yes, and in the South Atlantic, no, no, but there are ships with giant waves. For example, in 2001, ships Bremen and Caledonian Star were attacked by 30-meter killer waves.
The famous Bermuda Triangle is also a high-risk area. The pilots flying over the Bermuda Triangle more than once observed how 30-meter waves suddenly rose in it, which then fell just as suddenly. It may be that the killer waves regularly appearing in the triangle were the reason for the disappearance of a number of ships. For example, in 1984, the three-masted ship "Marquez", heading from Bermuda, fell victim to an attack by a sudden killer wave: it took only 45 seconds to sink the 36-meter ship. In that crash, only 19 of the 28 crew members survived. If no one survived, then the sudden disappearance of people and the ship would again be attributed to mysticism or aliens.
The most interesting thing is that giant killer waves are a phenomenon not only of oceans and seas, but also of lakes. The Great Lakes in America are their favorite places. In particular, Lake Superior is notorious for the "Three Sisters" waves that have sunk a lot of ships. On another American lake, the Upper, in 1974, the ship "Anderson" collided with two giant waves at once. "Anderson" was lucky - there were no casualties and severe destruction, but it soon became clear that at the same time and in the same place nearby sank, without even having time to give an SOS signal, the cargo ship "Edmund Fitzgerald" along with the entire crew.
And the Soviet fishing trawler "Kartli" with its place of registration in Kerch in December 1991 fell victim to a killer wave off the coast of the Scottish island of Gia - a huge wave then broke through the wheelhouse and rolled the ship sideways, it soon sank.
Ridges over the ocean
In the study of killer waves, researchers regularly face all sorts of surprises, far from pleasant. For example, scientists have made theoretical calculations of the appearance of rogue waves in the area of the Goma oil platform in the North Sea. According to these calculations, the emergence of giant destructive waves here should occur no more often than once every 10 thousand years. And in practice, radars recorded 466 killer waves in this region in just 12 years!
So how do killer waves come about? What causes them to appear? These questions still do not have clear answers. One of the earliest and main theories says that the reason for everything is the interference of waves, that is, when fast waves catch up with slower ones and merge with them, rising by a huge water ridge above the ocean surface. This does happen sometimes, but not always and everywhere. Huge waves are rising for other reasons as well.
Other possible reasons for the birth of rogue waves can be: a region of low pressure or waves having the same speed as the region of low pressure; very strong winds blowing in one direction for more than 12 hours continuously, or if the wind is driving waves against a strong current. Differences in atmospheric pressure are fraught with resonance phenomena, which can also provoke giant waves. And the infamous "three sisters", as a rule, arise when sea currents collide.
One recent study has demonstrated that phenomenal waves can be generated by a superposition of conventional waves that overlap each other at a certain small angle, resulting in a non-linear increase in amplitude, similar to that seen at resonance.
But the final word in science has not been said, and scientists have yet to figure out all the secret mechanisms of killer waves for a long time. However, the main thing has now been done - the existence of such waves is officially recognized at all levels.
And now engineers must change the principles of building ships and oil platforms. Before the official recognition of the existence of killer waves, seagoing vessels were built taking into account the extreme height of the linear wave of only 10.75 meters and a maximum load of 26-60 kN / sq. mm, which, you see, is simply ridiculous in the light of what is now known about the insidious and merciless killer waves of gigantic height.
Marina Sitnikova