Monster waves seen from space
p2pnet.net OT News:- Under the absolutely-nothing-to-do-with-p2p but nonetheless-fascinating heading, an ocean mystery has been solved.
[If you're not interested in huge waves able to leap tall buildings and swallow them whole (figuratively speaking : ) , stop right here and we apologise for wasting your time - Ed]
Otherwise ………
“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,” says the European Space Agency here. “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 and rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in many such cases, says ESA.
No one had ever seen one, although “Objective radar evidence from this and other platforms – radar data from the North Sea’s Goma oilfield recorded 466 rogue wave encounters in 12 years – helped convert previously sceptical scientists, whose statistics showed such large deviations from the surrounding sea state should occur only once every 10000 years,” says ESA.
Then, in December 2000, the European Union initiated MaxWave to confirm the widespread occurrence of rogue waves, model how they occur and consider their implications for ship and offshore structure design criteria.
Now WaveAtlas, a new research project, will use two years worth of ERS imagettes to create a worldwide atlas of rogue wave events and carry out statistical analyses.
Principal investigator is Susanne Lehner, associate professor in the division of applied marine physics at the University of Miami, who also worked on MaxWave while at DLR, with Wolfgang Rosenthal, senior scientist with the GKSS Forschungszentrum GmbH research centre in Geesthacht in Germany, a co-investigator on the project.
“Looking through the imagettes ends up feeling like flying, because you can follow the sea state along the track of the satellite,” Lehner said. “Other features like ice floes, oil slicks and ships are also visible on them, and so there’s interest in using them for additional fields of study.”
July 23rd, 2004 at 2:47 am
ahem is right. but its nice to remember there is a world going on.
July 23rd, 2004 at 3:59 am
Don’t believe everything you might have heard on the Gordon Lightfoot ballad; the Edmund Fitzgerald was sunk, it is thought, by a sudden, giant wind-generated wave, as evidenced by the fact that the crew did not even have time to don life vests or send a distress signal before going down.
In part due to the popularity of the hit song, the Edmund Fitzgerald was perhaps one of the most famous incidents of maritime disaster, though this happened in a Lake Superior storm rather than the open sea. It is worth noting that many, if not most people’s knowledge of the event was due mainly to the song lyrics.
BTW – this song, although made 3 decades ago, is widely available on – you guessed it! – P2P networks. So as to the “absolutely-nothing-to-do-with-p2p” claim, I strongly disagree
July 23rd, 2004 at 5:23 am
Thanks! I KNEW there was a valid reason for posting this – if I could only figure out what it was : )
Cheers
July 23rd, 2004 at 2:47 pm
In a majority of ship sinkings of very long vessels, like the Edmund Fitzgerald, it has been shown that the ship’s can break their backs in heavy seas. A ship usually cannot support the weight of itself without the buoyancy forces acting on the hull as it floats in the water. If you get a situation where the dynamic loading of the buoyancy becomes too concentrated, ie The ship crests on two waves forward and aft, or on a wave amidships, then there is a distinct possiblity of breaking her back as the ship’s longitudinal strength may not have been designed for such an eventuality. Here’s a cool picture taken off the west coast.
http://freehost15.websamba.com/offdarock/snaps/0232.jpg
Pretty scary stuff.
July 24th, 2004 at 7:23 am
Very true. When divers found the E. Fitzgerald, they discovered it had broken up – as did the Titanic.
The same principle is used in US Navy’s newer anti-ship torpedoes. Instead of traditional torpedoes, which hit from the side, these dive down and then travel upward, hitting the bottom of the ship. The explosive force is designed to lift the ship into the air, thereby snapping it in half, and in many cases, sinking it immediately.
July 25th, 2004 at 4:23 am
Maybe The WAVE that hit the ship pictured in this story Was from The Induce Act!!!!!! Wake up America their coming to Steal your Rights!!!!!!!!
July 25th, 2004 at 7:02 am
Model Number of these torpedos, please?
I’ve never heard anything so asinine in my life. Lift the ship into the air, indeed.
Submariners have *long* known that a good torpedo hit below the keel amidships can have the effect of displacing sufficient water from the blast area that in effect the ship becomes supported by the sea only forward and aft, resulting in overstressing the keel and effectively breaking the ship’s back. But there is nothing new about this.
July 25th, 2004 at 12:51 pm
All this is very very interesting, like learning that there are two large wrecks every week in the world -you would think people would pay more attention to this when cargo space is so scarce… that said, why did it take a satellite in space for us to learn these monster waves are almost commonplace? Surely the modern container ships and the like must have spotted one or two and come out unscathed like the “Puget Sound”?
July 27th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
I can think of several diffent reasons why it took data analysis from the Eurpean Space Agency to crack the simplistic view that supertanker and other vessels sinkings were due to “bad weather”. The age old warning that “there are monsters” out there was taken as myth, not fact. It is quite disconcerting to think that 100 foot waves are quite a bit more common than was previously accepted. In addition, it will cost quite a bit more to design ships, off shore platforms and even port facilities to be able to withstand 100 foot waves as opposed to the previous standard of about 45% of that.
It will also make me rethink any suggestion of open ocean travel, no matter what size ship it may be on.
January 11th, 2005 at 4:06 pm