This fine-looking vessel is the MS München. At over a quarter of a kilometre long, she’s
roughly the same size as the Titanic and boasts a capacity of more than 45,000 metric tons
- that’s big enough to transport four and a half million good-sized badgers… On the 7th of December 1978, the München
departed from Bremerhaven, Germany, headed for Savannah, Georgia. A fierce storm had been raging across the
North Atlantic for some weeks at the time, but the captain of the München wasn’t worried. His huge ship had been designed to handle
stormy weather with ease. In fact, thanks to certain properties of her
design, the MS München was considered practically unsinkable… some people never learn. So, unperturbed by the weather, the 28-man
crew of the München charted a course for the heart of the storm… but neither ship
nor crew ever came out the other side. As the winds in the North Atlantic began to die down, a
huge search effort was launched involving 13 aircraft and some 80 ships. Traces of the München were found - including
several eerily empty lifeboats - but it soon became clear the ship had been taken by the
storm. To this day, the giant vessel remains lost
somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. An investigation was launched to uncover what
could possibly have happened to sink such an enormous vessel. And what it turned up was… nothing. Or at least, nothing that made any sense. There were no convenient icebergs nearby to
blame things on, and nobody could come up with a plausible explanation as to how a vessel
considered practically unsinkable could have been eaten by a North Atlantic storm. In the end, the investigation concluded that
a ‘freak weather event’ was to blame - which is maritime shorthand for ‘we-literally-have-no-idea-what-happened-but-this-is-a-mandatory-field-and-a-I-have-to-write-something’. The investigation did uncover one weird little
detail though - one of the drifting lifeboats showed severe damage to the launching mechanism
used to release it into the water in an emergency. The damage seemed to imply that the lifeboat
hadn’t been actively launched by the München’s crew, but had instead been torn from the ship’s
side with enough force to bend the set of solid steel pins holding it in place. And that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Because the only thing in the middle of the
North Atlantic powerful enough to bend solid steel was the crushing force of a huge wave. But, while still attached to the ship’s
launching mechanism, the lifeboat would have hung some 20 metres above the water - far
higher than any wave could ever have reached. Or at least, that’s what oceanographers
at the time believed. You see, up until really quite recently, we
humans were under the impression that ocean wave heights strictly followed a classic normal
distribution - a bell curve. If that were true, the vast majority of waves
in any given stretch of ocean should be roughly the same height as those around them. Larger or smaller exceptions would be possible,
but increasingly unlikely the further they got from the average wave height. As you may know, wave height largely depends
on 3 factors: wind speed, wind duration, and the distance over which that wind blows in
one direction, also known as the ‘fetch’. Considering these variables, the MS München
should have been facing waves of around 10 to 12 metres the night she was lost. The idea that among those regular, 10 metre
waves, a 20 metre monster could suddenly have appeared to tear one of the lifeboats clean
off its launching gear was considered so statistically unlikely as to have been essentially impossible. But not everyone was quite so sceptical. Because despite what the maths said, there
were rumours that plenty of experienced seamen claimed to have come across random giant waves
out in the open ocean. According to the stories, these so-called
‘rogue’ waves seemed to appear out of nowhere and, far bigger than their peers,
struck with enough force to sink some of the biggest, best-equipped vessels ever built…
vessels like the MS München, for example. But these tall tales were taken with a generous
dose of sea salt by the scientific community - after all, the maths was clear: a random
giant wave among a stretch of far smaller waves just wasn’t a realistic statistical
possibility. For that reason, the strange sinking of the
MS München was largely forgotten for some 17 years until, on New Year’s Day in 1995,
something remarkable happened that changed the way science thought about oceanic waves
forever. This minor maritime miracle took place at
the Draupner offshore oil rig some 100 miles off the coast of Norway. A massive hurricane was sweeping across the
North Sea at the time, bringing with it enormous waves. The rig had been fitted with state-of-the-art
equipment capable of accurately measuring the height of those waves, and, as oceanographers
of the day would have expected, each passing peak was approximately the same height as
the last - around 12 metres, which is about the size of a 4-story building. But then, out of nowhere, the recording gear
picked up a 26 metre monster wave, more than twice as tall and steep as everything around
it. This mutant wave smashed against the oil rig,
damaging structures that were never expected to be anywhere near the waves below. When scientists came to analyse readings from
their equipment sometime later, they were forced to come to a vexing conclusion - the
Draupner oil rig had been struck by a wave so big it shouldn’t have existed. The Draupner wave, as it came to be known,
was the first rogue wave ever recorded by reliable scientific instruments. It was the oceanic equivalent of a camera
trap in the Himalayas snapping a picture of a yeti. A creature once considered a myth had suddenly
been shown to be very real indeed, and scientists who had confidently rejected stories of rogue
waves for decades suddenly found themselves frantically revisiting their calculations. There was, however, still hope of scientific
salvation. After all, extreme outcomes aren’t impossible
in a normal distribution of wave heights, they’re just statistically unlikely. Some brave soul went away and crunched the
numbers, and it turned out something as big as the Draupner wave should only come along
once every 20,000 years or so. Which raised an important question: was the
Draupner wave a statistical anomaly - an incredibly unlikely freak event… or a sign that our
assumptions about giant rogue waves were utterly incorrect? That question wasn’t only interesting to
oceanographers and theoreticians - its implications were truly frightening. You see, the Draupner oil platform had been
designed to withstand what scientists at the time believed was a once-in-10,000-year expected
maximum wave height of 20 metres. The rig survived the blow with only minor
damage, but it wasn’t the only thing built to design standards based on the idea that
very large waves were exceptionally rare - pretty much every ship on earth was, too. In fact, most were designed to withstand waves
of just 15 metres. If waves like the one that hit the Draupner
oil rig were more common than anyone had previously thought, the majority of mankind’s collective
fleet was at risk. In December 2000, the EU launched a project
called MaxWave to try and find out just how common these so-called rogue waves might be. As part of the project, they studied global
satellite data covering a 3-week period in order to carry out what was basically a rogue
wave census. Despite the relatively poor resolution of
the satellite images, the team found not one, not two, but ten rogue waves of 25 metres
or more. It was a pretty terrifying revelation, and
yet today we know that rogue waves – defined as waves that are twice as high as the so-called
‘significant wave height’ of the waves around them - are far more common even than
that. In fact, they occur every single day in every
ocean on planet earth. Some scientists believe as many as 1 in 3000
waves ‘go rogue.’ Just when you thought it was safe to go back
into the water. One little quirk of the rogue wave mythology
is that they appear to be a relatively modern phenomenon – the earliest mentions of such
waves come out of the early 19th century. Considering we humans have been pissing around
in boats for a good 10,000 years, that’s a little odd. But then again, it probably shouldn’t be
all that surprising. When the Queen Elizabeth II, a cruise liner
affectionately known as the QE2 to most Brits, came face to face with a rogue wave during
a hurricane in the North Atlantic in 1995, her captain described the wave as resembling
the white cliffs of Dover - a literal wall of water that bore down on his ship with frightening
force. The QE2 survived the encounter, but pretty
much any vessel built before the advent of steel double-hulled ships in the 20th century
almost certainly would not have. To put that another way, those who came across
rogue waves throughout most of human history probably didn’t live to tell the tale. Now, I know all of this sounds pretty scary. Thousands of ship-killing waves on the loose
in the world’s oceans and all that. But before you go and cancel that lovely cruise
you had planned, remember: a rogue wave is at least twice the height of its peers - that
means it’s only monstrous compared to the current sea state. If you’re on a ship in stormy seas where
the average wave is a 15-metre behemoth, a rogue wave could well spell your end. If, however, you’re cruising through crystal
clear and calm waters in the Caribbean, a rogue wave probably won’t even make you
spill your Pina colada. On top of that, it’s important to realise
that rogue waves are also exclusively fleeting phenomena. Unlike tsunamis, they don’t travel across
huge stretches of open ocean. They form rapidly and dissipate almost as
fast. Common they may be, but you’d still have
to get incredibly unlucky to actually come across one. So, why do they form so fast? Come to think of it, why do they form at all? If the mathematics of wave formation suggests
such giant waves shouldn’t really exist, why do they? As I mentioned earlier, oceanic waves are
largely formed by the wind, and you’d expect all the waves in a given stretch of sea to
be subjected to roughly the same wind conditions. If you watched my recent video on the lighthouse
keepers who went missing on the Flannan Isles one hundred and twenty years ago, you’ll
already know what I’m going to say here - the truth is, we still aren’t 100% sure
what causes rogue waves. Some researchers believe waves travelling
at different speeds can essentially ‘join forces’ to create a monster, while others
think intersecting currents might be the answer. But ultimately there are dozens of different
theories out there to choose from. It may well be that there’s no single process
that causes rogue waves, and that many different sea conditions can coax these ship-killing
giants into existence. As for whether a rogue wave sank the München
- it’s widely accepted that this apparently unsinkable ship - designed to shrug off rough
seas with ease - most likely was indeed sunk by a monumental rogue wave. A colossal wall of water perhaps 30 metres
high that reared up out of the night and devoured the ship. Unsurprisingly, the München isn’t the only
vessel to have been sunk by a rogue wave. In the last couple of decades of the 20th
century, more than 200 supertankers greater than 200 metres in length were lost to bad
weather around the world. It’s now thought that rogue waves were likely
the major cause behind many of those disasters, accounting for hundreds, perhaps thousands
of lives lost at sea. Today, scientists are studying rogue waves
in the hope that by better understanding them, we might be able to predict when and where
they’re most likely to form - you know, to ensure we’re nowhere bloody near when
they do. But the processes involved are extremely complex,
and predicting rogue wave formation in real time is going to be a significant challenge. Before I go, I have one more piece of exciting
news for all you sailing enthusiasts out there - it turns out scientists now think ‘super’
rogue waves up to 5 times the size of the waves around them might be a thing. Considering your bog-standard rogue wave is
apparently capable of sinking a supertanker with ease, we can only guess at the kind of
devastation a super rogue wave would be capable of. But hey, if you ever find yourself on a ship
far out at sea watching the horizon darken like that scene in Interstellar, at least
now you’ll know what’s about to kill you. Thanks for watching.
