The Grand Unified Theory of Rogue Waves
Rogue waves — enigmatic giants of the sea — were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms. But a new idea that borrows from the hinterlands of probability theory has the potential to predict them all.
Rogue waves long lived only as sailor lore. Hard evidence of their existence has come only in the past few decades.
Andreas Rocha for Quanta Magazine
Charlie Wood
Contributing Writer
February 5, 2020
Two weeks before Christmas in 1978, the cargo ship MS München encountered a fierce storm in the North Atlantic. Although the captain couldn’t evade it, the forecasted waves and winds should have posed no threat to the 261-meter-long ship. At midnight, just three hours earlier, an operator had radioed out to a cruise ship, “Have a good trip and see you soon.†Now came a distress call from the München — then silence. The West German vessel and its 28-person crew vanished, leaving behind just four lifeboats, three shipping containers, and a handful of flotation devices.
One clue in particular stumped investigators. A recovered lifeboat — originally bolted to the München about 20 meters above the water — appeared to have been ripped from its perch by a tremendous force hurtling toward the ship’s stern. Rumors circulated that a monstrous wave had crashed onto the deck from above, but such a swell was, at the time, unthinkable. West Germany’s Maritime Board of Inquiry eventually declared it “impossible to explain the cause of the sinking.â€
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-grand-unified-theory-of-rogue-waves-20200205/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
