A Descent Into The Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

https://poestories.com/read/descent

Was a crew member in a sailing regatta and for one 5-10 minute period the waves were just coming from everywhere, breaking all over the place. It was exhilarating, like riding a roller coaster up and down! Then a (relatively) very big one, out of the blue. It seemed to go between us and the next boat, maybe 60 feet away. From the deck, we couldn't even see the top of the mast of the other boat.

And then we fell out of the water.

Our boat, all 30,000 pounds of it, dropped straight down and we crashed, hard, into the water below. The mast bent so much that the cable stays were loose. The impact threw everyone down. The sound: it sounded like the fiberglass crunched and broke. For a moment we all thought we were dead. But we weren't. The mast snapped back so hard the cable stays made a twanging sound. Sails limp - no wind at the bottom of the hole. Then the water all around us swallowed us up; our buoyancy sent us shooting straight up with a lot of force. The wind hit us hard; no time to reflect; have to deal with that now.

We were never a good team, but I came away from it with far more confidence being on the water than I started :)

This is advice, hard won, by mariners who abandoned their ship, were lost at sea in their lifeboat, and left behind them a ghost boat that eventually makes its way to shore.

It’s interesting to know that they happen a lot more often than would be expected statistically from those simple mechanics. Yet another fun potential rare event to keep in mind while surfing in Northern California :)

How can an aircraft carrier launch and recover planes if it's being rocked by waves?

How can a destroyer launch missiles from vertical launch cells if waves are constantly crashing on the deck?

I wonder how a Navy made up entirely of nuclear submarines would fare against a more diverse force with an equal number of hulls.

Submarine-launched missiles, in a diverse navy, can launch from underwater. That's great for stealth. It's terrible for budget. A submarine-only fleet would need to surface to economically attempt coastal bombardment and air defence.

That said, I'm not sure what fraction of e.g. the U.S. Navy's submarine missiles are capable of subsurface dispatchment.

For fixed wing jets that need to land on deck… even if you ignored the wind that goes along with these conditions, I think recovering aircraft would be too great a risk. That does bring up the wind and visibility that (almost always) goes along with these extreme sea states, which would be probably just as hazardous as the deck pitching about to flight ops.

For basically everything else, I think the naval systems work just fine in bad weather.

In regards to rogue waves, an 85 foot wave would put green water on the flight deck of the carrier I was on, something that would be difficult to imagine for me. Aircraft on the flight deck are chained down with multiple chains, each of the chains having the strength to hold the entire aircraft down, so I can’t imagine losing aircraft, but flooding the planes with sea water probably wouldn’t be good for them.

The ocean is bigger.

It is only a matter of time until one is lost

The ocean is the boss of sailors, a loving but harsh mistress.

3 destroyers sank, with almost 1000 lives lost, and virtually every ship in the fleet took enough damage to at least force a port visit, if not a major repair/refit.

Plus, I bet somebody would work out who did it if a country used a nuke to create a wave, there are only a couple candidates for who could do this sort of thing, after all. I bet it would have pretty significant diplomatic ramifications to… inconvenience a carrier group for a couple minutes.

Not very effective.

Tsunami waves move huge volumes of water, but in the open ocean they are also very long waves. Their travel speed is about the same as the "linear long wave speed", or about sqrt(g*D) where D is the depth of the water.

As these waves approach the shore, however, the ocean becomes more shallow. Waves slow down. The tsunami effectively "piles up" on itself, and a wave that was a little high and a lot long becomes a wave that's a lot high and a little long.

A carrier operating away from shore would see the tsunami in its more benign state. Coastal cities, however, would be in trouble.

I know very little more than that, but it was in the news here some years ago.

I do know it was a failure, quite a comprehensive failure

To my knowledge, rogue wave dissipate quickly. So they'd be a short-range weapon. I think the wave mechanics that solve for rogue waves solve for a greater number of proximate positions. One could imagine a linear wave generator, but that's extra kit; I assume a well-positioned explosion could do the trick. Hmm.

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In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet).

The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded.

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However, right below that, it says:

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It wasn't until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway.

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New wave is 58 feet, wave in 1995 is 85 feet?

>Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than twice the height of the waves surrounding it. The Draupner wave, for instance, was 25.6 meters tall, while its neighbors were only 12 meters tall.

The one in Norway was only roughly double the height of surrounding waves.

Right, so they have to be much more common than said, because a rogue wave could be 6" high on glass-calm seas.

The resolution is that the absolute rogue-wave-height isn't the measure of extreme, it's the rogue-wave-height relative to the typical height. This is explained in TFA if you read carefully.

> Scientists define a rogue wave as any wave more than twice the height of the waves surrounding it. The Draupner wave, for instance, was 25.6 meters tall, while its neighbors were only 12 meters tall.

And of course this makes sense.

We know a surprising amount about their mechanics due to replication in the lab [1][2]. We don't have lots of observational evidence to support the lab effects accurately replicating the ocean, but I don't think we've generally seen evidence for lab surface water materially differing from ocean surface water.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave

[2] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/70...

If there are 500 measuring stations, then every year some one of them is going to experience a once-in-500-years event. We just never notice the other 499, and cherry-pick the one outlier after it already happened. (Yeah, there can be correlation between station measurements; obviously I'm speaking in generalities.)

Not really. You got it exactly backwards. The return period of an event is determined based on all recorded events. This does not mean that massive events that took place in the past didn't existed if no record was kept. Consequently, massive events are underrepresented both in magnitude and in frequency, and consequently estimates of their return period tend to be larger.

Think of it this way: the concept of the return period of an event (i.e., this is a one in X year's event) is determined based on the average time between similar events.

The buoy was in for at most a handful of years, and catches a 1-in-1300 year event in that one location?

The first thought on that should not be "what incredible luck!", but "is there something special about this location, or is that 1-in-1300 estimate off?".

Do they mean per-buoy? Or what?

The first massive wave lumbers through at the same pace of the surrounding waves leaving you thinking "Oh that big wave is the rogue wave" when suddenly the bottom drops out and an even more massive wave comes very fast and seemingly overtakes the slower one. It seems like the slower large wave just stops in place and reduces in amplitude while the rogue wave overtakes it.

The bottom may be exposed by the trough

They may crest breaking over your boat smashing it

In confined waters maintaining heading may not be possible, which is critical

I've been petitioning for a bow- or mast-mounted camera for spotting debris.

The most interesting part of her documentary book for me was the fairly recent event of 1740 foot/~550 meter tall tsunami wave that generated by a mountain breaking and falling into the sea as result of serious earthquake in Alaska, and 1 (one) person who survived riding on it in his boat. Truly an epic wall of wate that was measured for us by the high watermark of the broken trees on the surrounding mountains.

This isn't exactly true. The ~550 meter height corresponds to the height up to which trees were cleared. However, the tsunami was created by a massive landslide in a contained bay, which pushed the water uphill much like someone falling in a filled tub can push water up the walls.

> The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded.

Video says it was a 5-story wave.. "60 feet", article's wave was 58 feet.

Take it however you want, but the stated goal is still valid and we have the technology.

https://archive.org/details/filk_fire_in_the_sky/14+Waveride...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25965-7-rogue-wave-di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rogue_waves