Scientists Finally Have an Explanation for How They Occur

Rogue waves are a little bit less mysterious now, but they’re still pretty incredible. Image: ChatGPT

Rogue waves, for most of sailing history, were thought to be a myth. It wasn’t until 1995 that one was actually recorded, but the science behind how they’re created has been relatively murky. But a new study recently published in Nature shines more light on the strange mechanics that lead to the birth of rogue waves.

Until 1995, reports by sailors of freak waves that reached hundreds of feet high out of nowhere were never taken seriously by the scientific community. There was no doubt that some vessels seemingly vanished, but the survivors’ tales seemed about as tall as the waves they told about. Then came the Draupner wave. According to Newswire, the first one scientists actually recorded was in 1995. The Draupner Wave rolled through off the coast of Norway. In seas that measured approximately 12 meters (a whisper under 40 feet), the Draupner Wave was 25.6 meters (84 feet).

“It confirmed what seafarers had described for centuries,” Francesco Fedele said in a statement. Fedele is an associate professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and lead author of a new paper detailing how rogue waves are created.  “They always talked about these waves that appear suddenly and are very large – but for a long time, we thought this was just a myth.”

Coming up with a thorough explanation of how a rogue wave is created, however, proved pretty difficult, even for the world’s best scientists. Math, as you’d expect, played a big role in figuring out how much energy is needed to make one and how that energy could all come to be in the right place at the right time, but the size of the playground that rogue waves like to hang around in made that daunting, to say the least. The researchers involved in the study decided they’d pull data from the last 18 years, looking at 27,500 rogue waves, and examined similarities that might help them find out the conditions that are needed for one to form. What they found is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time. As it turns out, there aren’t any special forces required — just the right ones at the right time.

“Rogue waves follow the natural orders of the ocean – not exceptions to them,” Fedele said. “This is the most definitive, real-world evidence to date. They’re extreme, but they’re explainable.”

See, when a wave is heading in one direction at one speed and runs into a wave traveling in a different direction at a different speed, they combine forces and create a single, taller wave. When a bunch of them do that at the same time, and under the right conditions, a rogue waves rears its head. Sure, it’s rare for that to happen, but when it does, the forces created are entirely explainable by science.

“Rogue waves are, simply, a bad day at sea,” Fedele concluded. “They are extreme events, but they’re part of the ocean’s language. We’re just finally learning how to listen.”

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