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If a four-story wall of water dashes across the open ocean and no one is around to see it, does it actually exist? Well, if that mighty rogue wave is experienced by a buoy, then it does.
A potentially killer wave rose above the waters off the coast of British Columbia. And while nobody actually witnessed this magnificent but terrifying rogue wave, it was recorded by a MarineLabs buoy tethered about 4.5 miles off the coast near the small town of Ucluelet – roughly 175 miles northwest of Seattle.
A massive rogue wave was measured to be 58 feet high – nearly triple the size of the average waves around it – breaking the record for proportionality.
“Proportionally, the Ucluelet wave is likely the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded,” explains Dr. Johannes Gemmrich – a research physicist at the University of Victoria. “Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, and nothing of this magnitude.”
“The probability of such an event occurring is once in 1,300 years,” Gemmrich declared.
“Only a few rogue waves in high sea states have been observed directly, but they can pose a danger to marine operations, onshore and offshore structures, and beachgoers,” the authors of the study write. “Rogue waves can be the consequence of third-order nonlinear four-wave interactions between free waves forming a modulational instability17 where individual waves can grow as sidebands, drawing energy from neighboring waves.”
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The freak wave wasn’t the largest ever recorded – that record happened in 1995 about 100 miles off the coast of Norway. The Draupner Wave was a whopping 84 feet high, compared to the other waves at the time that measured approximately 40 feet tall.
“While the Ucluelet rogue wave wasn’t quite as tall, in proportion to the surrounding seas, it was far more intense. So intense, in fact, it’s been called a ‘once-in-a-millennium’ event,” according to The Inertia.
“The unpredictability of rogue waves, and the sheer power of these ‘walls of water’ can make them incredibly dangerous to marine operations and the public,” MarineLabs CEO Dr. Scott Beatty told Newswire. “The potential of predicting rogue waves remains an open question, but our data is helping to better understand when, where and how rogue waves form, and the risks that they pose.”
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The authors of the study created a visualization of the extreme oceanic event.
The study on the historic wave was published in Scientific Reports by Gemmrich and Leah Cicon from the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria.
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