Astrum Space - The Giant Waves Scientists Refused to Admit Exist | Astrum Earth

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

The ocean holds a secret more terrifying than any monster.Want to restore the planet’s ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 100 people to join Planet Wild with my code ASTRUM9 will get the first month for free at: https://planetwild.com/r/astrumearth/... If you want to get to know them better first, check out their project cleaning up one of Europe’s most polluted rivers in Albania: https://planetwild.com/r/astrumearth/m27⁠ ▀▀▀▀▀▀Imagine a force so powerful it can capsize the largest ships, yet it was dismissed as a myth for centuries. We're exploring the real science behind rogue waves, the mysterious giants of the open ocean. Uncover how these colossal walls of water form and pose a deadly threat to anyone in their path. Could you witness one and live to tell the tale?▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

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those doubters several centuries later if they learn that the legend of the rogue wave is in fact a scientific reality. Rogue waves are one of the most terrifying concepts in Earth science. Steep insurmountable walls of water with the capacity to annihilate anything and anyone in their path. I'm James Stewart and you're watching Astrom Earth. In this video we'll explore the phenomenon of rogue waves, how they form, where they come from and crucially how likely you might be to encounter one. To give you an idea of what we're dealing with here, these are the words of Ernest Shackleton from 1919, who gave an account of an extreme wave he witnessed during his epic 1300-kilometer voyage

in the 7-meter whaler James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia. I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but the white crest of an enormous wave. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean. White surged the foam of the breaking sea around us. We felt our boat lifted and flung forward like a cork in breaking surf. We were in a seething chaos of tortured water,

but somehow the boat lived through it, half full of water, sagging to the dead weight and shuddering under the blow. Despite accounts like these, for centuries, science refused to acknowledge the existence of rogue waves at all. Scientific methodology for measuring the size of a wave simply did not allow for these anomalies, or the frequency at which reports came in. So far-fetched a concept was it, and so few that experienced them sadly returned to tell the tale, that despite numerous stories like Shackleton's, it's only in the last few decades that science has had no choice but to accept. the reality of rogue waves. So what actually are they? Rogue waves are those massive, unexpected waves that seem to come out of nowhere and can be incredibly powerful. These waves are

much bigger than the surrounding waves and can appear without warning, making them especially dangerous for sailors and offshore structures. Unlike typical waves that follow predictable patterns, Rogue waves are rare and often surprising. They don't seem to come from the same direction as prevailing wind or waves, which is why they've been the stuff of legends and maritime law for so long. Technically speaking, when scientists talk about wave height, they tend to focus on the tallest one-third of the waves passing through a point in a given time period. They call the average of these the significant wave height.

No matter the weather conditions, waves are the weather conditions, waves are vary in size. It's those taller, significant waves that have the most energy and are most likely to cause damage. To be a rogue wave, the wave has to be at least twice as high as the significant wave height in the area. And throughout history, there have been many significantly larger than that. The first person to officially report a rogue wave was 19th century French explorer and naval officer Gilles de Monde de Erville, a botanist and cartographer, sailing around the world on various expeditions. Dumont reported seeing rogue waves over 30 metres high in the Indian Ocean, a report bolstered by three eyewitnesses who'd been with him. Ultimately, though, his claims amounted to

nothing. He was publicly ridiculed for his stories across society. Even the French Prime Minister voice his disinterest in the stories. As such, in the decades that followed, the notion of a giant, rogue wave sort of just disappeared. It wouldn't be for nearly 150 years that the phenomena crept back into the public domain once again. Skeptics agreed that waves of such a size simply did not exist, and if they did, then no one would survive long enough to return home and tell the tale. Waves are created as energy is transferred to the ocean through friction, caused by the wind blowing along the surface,

as well as the gravitational pull of the sun. and the moon upon the earth. This energy travels through the water as a wave, until an obstacle eventually breaks it up or crashes into the shore. The reason then that scientists didn't think it was possible for rogue waves to exist was because they thought these waves of energy were linear, otherwise known as the linear wave theory. As such, the size of waves can be predictably calculated with some simple maths.

Therefore, the general scientific consensus at the time, was that oceanic waves could only reach a maximum height of nine meters. With the advent of steel-hulled ships in the 20th century, things changed, as the probability of surviving such an event increased dramatically, and so did the number of reported sightings. Indeed, between 1969 and 1994, 22 supercarriers were lost due to impact with rogue waves, killing 525 people. In 1978, the cargo ship MS Munchen, then one of the biggest, most modern cargo vessels in the world, issued a distress signal at 3.10 a.m. on December 12th.

That SOS call marked the last time the crew would be heard from ever again. The ship bound for Savannah in Georgia got into trouble in the North Atlantic, under pressure from extremely bad weather. At over 240 metres long and 30 meters tall, The ship had been built to cope with waves of up to 15 metres and was widely considered unsinkable. Yet hours after the distress was issued in the small hours of the morning, the rescue planes sent out to recover the ship found no trace of her or her crew. What followed was the largest search and rescue operation ever conducted in the North Atlantic.

Thirteen planes circled above for signs of life and over 100 cargo ships passing through the busy shipping lane participated in the search operation. It wasn't until months later that a lifeboat was finally recovered from the vessel and revealed something no one thought possible. The Munshan's life rafts which had been bolted to the ship 20 metres above the water didn't appear to have been lowered by the crew. Instead they'd been ripped from the ship's stern by some terrifying force and flung into the ocean. This mysterious invisible force had enough power to bend the steel hinges backwards, snapping the lifeboat off the ship. Decades later in the Forensic Files, a rogue wave has emerged as the prime suspect.

Rogue waves are capable of exerting forces of 100 tonnes per square meter. Far greater than the 15 tons, the ships are usually designed to withstand. Even this tragic event still wasn't enough to sway scientific appearance. opinion on the feasibility of rogue waves, until irrefutable evidence finally emerged. In 1980, Philip Lejeure captured one of the first ever pictures of a rogue wave off the east coast of South Africa. And years later, on New Year's Day, 1995, the most famous rogue wave was officially recorded. While the rest of the world were nursing hangovers that morning, the crew of the Drowpner Oil installation were trying to stay set up.

on their feet in the rough and turbulent waters of the Norwegian Sea, a relatively shallow stretch of water that only runs 100 metres deep. It's full of churning violent waters and the turbulent nature of the North Sea is why structures like oil platforms have to be anchored to the ground, preventing them from being washed away. To survive this hellish stretch of water, the droughtner platform was equipped with a downward pointing laser to keep track of the surrounding sea state. Little did the crew know that this device would soon make a startling discovery. On this day, the platform laser measured a mammoth 25.6 meter wave rising out of the ocean.

The engineers who built the drought in the reed calculated that once every 10,000 years the North Sea might throw them a 20-meter curveball, but 25 meter waves were not part of the equation. From this moment on, everything scientists thought they knew about rogue waves changed almost overnight. Not only did this wave dwarf all scientific estimates of the maximum height of a wave, but it was also more than twice the size of the other waves surrounding the platform, which only reached 11 meters in height. This supersized freak wave was named the Droupner wave, and remains the most famous rogue wave of all time. And so science finally acknowledged the existence of rogue waves, and in turn the linear models used to predict wave height were thrown into disrepute.

The drought and the wave changed the game and the face of nautical events for good. Perhaps more pressing as a result of this discovery was the miscalculation of the amount of stress ships could withstand, a point they would come into focus soon after. That same year, the Queen Elizabeth II was on route to New York from England when a rogue wave over 27 metres struck the vessel. The wave was so large that it smashed windows in the grand saloon, 21 metres above the waterline. The captain later said it looked as if the ship was heading for the white cliffs of Dover. So large was the wall of white water staring him down. A couple of years later on February 13, 1997, about 5 million Legos were lost at sea,

when a rogue wave tipped a massive cargo ship dubbed the Tokyo Express. The event known as the Great Lego Spill is the worst toy-related environmental disaster of all time, and beachcomers still uncover the shipwrecked plastic treasures even today. Pieces of Lego are still turning up on the beaches of Cornwall. nearly 25 years after the original spill. The ship was en route to New York after it loaded its cargo in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, when an unpredictable 8.5 metre wave smashed into the ship, 20 miles off the mainland. Somewhat ironically, many of the Lego pieces were actually sea creature themed.

Those sorts of events where plastic finds its way into our oceans and our ecosystems feels like it's happening more and more, doesn't it? doesn't it? Everywhere we turn on the news, microplastics seem to be infiltrating every corner of our world. It can be quite overwhelming. And personally speaking for me, it makes me feel helpless at times. What can I do sitting here watching this video? Does it actually make a difference? Well, the good news is yes, it actually does. Our friends at Planet Wild are a community-based nature protection organisation. Think of them like crowdfunding but for nature.

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wave off the coast of Scotland. The ship was rigged with instruments. Everything that happened out there was being precisely measured. Months later, long after she'd returned safely to the Southampton Docks, Penny Holliday, one of the expedition's two chief scientists, began to analyze these figures. She discovered that the waves they had experienced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The wave was so large it caused the ship to heal 28 degrees to port, roll 30 degrees back to starboard and then recover. The report which wasn't presented until several years later concluded as follows. None of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models, the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries and passenger boats rely, had predicted these behemoths. According to all of the theoretical models at the time, under this particular set of weather conditions, waves of this size should never have existed.

Yet they did, and they continued to exist. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put together a catalogue in 2007. They listed 50 historical maritime incidents that were most likely due to rogue waves. and unsurprisingly, the encounters have continued well into the 21st century. It was here that something very special came along that caught the entire world off guard, the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded. In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia, near Eucloulet, 17.6 metres high. So shocked was the world by this that local news channels referred to the so-called Euclulet wave

as a once-in-a-millan event. The Eucloulet wave broke records because it towered three times as tall as the surrounding waves, as tall as a four-story building. This was the most extreme size difference ever observed in a rogue wave. Despite taking well over a century, rogue waves had finally revealed themselves to the sun. scientific world, and indeed the world as a whole, changing the nature of maritime travel forever. Our oceans contain so much intrigue and so much mystery with many people across the planet harboring fears of what may lurk down below. Yet all along, one of nature's most powerful forces was hidden in plain sight.

Having identified the terrifyingly tangible existence of rogue waves, the next big question was, where exactly do they come from? Given how new all of this is, rogue waves are still very much an area of active scientific research at the time of recording this video. That's a sort of nice way of saying scientists haven't quite pinned down a simple, single reason for how rogue waves are formed. It seems unlikely there is one nicely succinct, gift-wrapped answer for me to give you. Instead, at the moment, there are three main theories which we'll consider here. The first is the notion of constructive interference, and this is the basic physics of how rogue waves were formed. Essentially, it suggests that a bunch of waves together in an ocean, all travelling at different speeds and directions, sort of parl into each other, creating one single giant wave for a short period of time.

When the swells pass through one another, their crests, troughs and lengths coincide, reinforcing each other and is hence referred to as wave reinforcement. Secondly, it's also possible that ocean currents may play a role in rogue wave formation. When waves formed by a storm develop in a water current against the normal wave direction, an interaction can take place, which results in a sort of shortening of the wave frequency. This can cause the waves to dynamically join together, forming very big rogue wave. waves. The currents where these are sometimes seen are the Gulf Stream and the Agulis current. But there are also rogue waves that occur away from ocean currents, quite

literally in the middle of nowhere. So what about them? For this, we need to dive into the mystifying world of quantum physics for a non-linear explanation. In simple terms, this theory demonstrates that wave components can interact and exchange energy without a tangible outside cause. Random processes caused by smaller waves can create an unstable, larger wave. That large wave sucks up energy from smaller waves around it before it becomes too unstable and then collapses. This causes waves around the rogue wave to become smaller, concentrating their energy into one wave that lasts longer. Scientists at the Australian National University, Hamburg University of Technology and the University of

Turin demonstrated the possibility in a 2012 experiment involving a Lego pirate on a ship, yes, Lego again, floating in a fish tank that was published in Physical Review X. Non-linear interactions between waves allow one wave to sap energy from surrounding waves and focus it into one much larger short-lived wave. This theory gets very technical and in truth offers the very unsatisfying conclusion that Everything is random and stuff like this can just happen? Cool? We'll let you pick your favourite theory and let us know why down below in the comments.

But one final point on rogue wave formation is how they differ from breaking waves. Those are the huge waves we see surfers trying to tame in spectacular fashion, most notably in places like Nazaree in Portugal. These types of waves occur near the shore, where the depth of the sea floor rises steeply, forcing the momentum of the water upward. In the case of Nazaree, it sits at the end of an underwater canyon, making it perfect for these breaking waves to rise to the crazy heights of 28 metres, which we saw ridden by German big wave surfer Sebastian Studeb. Whilst incredibly impressive, the size is the only

thing that these breakers have in common with rogue waves. Because we know how breaking waves are formed, they are infinitely more predictable than the rogue waves that are capable of striking out of nowhere in the middle of the ocean. So then where might you find a giant wall of water looming towards you? Unlike killer whales, finding a killer wave is a little more tricky. Part of their devastation is their randomness. We simply do not know where these things might appear. That's a huge part of what makes them so terrifying. Whilst some of the encounters over the years have happened close-ish to coastlines or land, some have literally come out of nowhere in the middle of a vast ocean expanse. It's the reason their formation is so hard to articulate. How does physics account

for something so random? The good or possibly bad news, depending on how you look at it, is there are parts of the world more likely to encounter this type of phenomena based on their geographical factors, things like wind direction, currents and even the topography of the ocean floor. The interplay of these factors can create rogue wave focus points, rather like focusing lights through a magnifying glass. One of these can be found in South Africa, where the fast-flowing Agula's current changes the characteristics of waves along the east coast of South Africa, and is responsible for sinking around 150 ships in recent decades.

It flows southward along the southeast coast of Mozambique and the coast of South Africa, foreturning eastward to join the flow from Africa to Australia, and is one of the fastest flowing currents in the ocean, reaching an estimated top speed of 5.8 miles per hour. Caused by a combination of strong winds, the cold Antarctic circumpolar current and the warmer Agulis current, abnormally large waves are often reported here, with wave increases, in extreme cases, by 60% as a result.

The research shows that wind's strong fast-moving currents like this one interact with oncoming waves. It causes them to significantly increase in height and steepness, particularly when the waves encounter the current at an opposing angle. Based on that theory, another potential hotspot for rogue waves could be in and around the Gulf Stream. This could go some way to explaining some of the historical shipwrecks in and around the Bermuda Triangle. We've actually got a separate video about that, if you know, like to check it out. These findings published in 2005 have led to many ships avoiding the Agulis area where possible, especially during severe weather. But how can we predict where a rogue wave may strike next? For this we enter the realm of the unknown, the future. Researchers at

the University of Maryland have created a new tool they claim predicts rogue waves up to five minutes in advance of them striking. They used a dataset consisting of 16 million sea surface elevation measurements from 172 boys located near the shores of the continental United States. This dataset contained thousands of rogue waves, which the team then processed and compiled for training the neural networks. Whilst that all sounds quite promising, it's worth noting this technology hasn't been effectively used outside of a controlled environment, and the ocean, as we've explored in this video, is anything but controllable. Perhaps there might be a time in the coming decades where we can predict when these ocean

monsters might strike. But until then, it still feels very much like a game of chance. Depending on your perspective, rogue waves might well be either one of the most impressive phenomena on planet Earth, or one of the most terrifying, or for me, a bit of both. Undeniably, one of the most devastating concepts in natural science. A simple question of physics that has the capacity to annihilate anything in its path without a trace. The good news is that much of the research we've discussed has caused shipmakers to change the way they build ships and make them much stronger to absorb something like this.

But even so, seeing a huge, insurmountable wall of water coming towards you, towering over something as large and as modern as a cruise liner, and capable of exerting pressure of about 100 tonnes per square meter, is surely something few, if any, would survive. Some reassurance might come from the data, however. Despite these once every 1300-year events occurring a bit more frequently than that, the most recent numbers show that only 210 rogue waves were reported over a seven-year period from 2011 to 2018. Indeed, the last widely accepted ship to be sunk by a rogue wave was the German cargo vessel we discussed earlier, the MS Munchen, which disappeared in the North Atlantic in

December 1978. The chance of you actually experiencing a rogue wave is very, very slim, and the chance of your ship being sunk as a result of one is even slimmer. But it certainly adds a bit more tension to the next time you're out on the open ocean, knowing a rogue wave may be brewing not too far away. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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