Stuff You Should Know - How Rogue Waves Work

Episode Date: September 30, 2014

Rogue waves come out of nowhere and tower as much as 100 feet over hapless ships they encounter, breaking across the boat and frequently breaking the boat and its inhabitants. Investigate the mystery of rouge waves in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua Clark. There's Charles Bryant. There's Jerome Rowland. All of us. Full first names only for this episode. That's right. I love Colin Jerry Jerome. Yeah, I don't know when that started,

but it's one of my favorite nicknames. Jero Mina. Yeah. Jairs. We've colored jairs a lot too. Yeah. And just Jeff. Yeah, what I typically do for nicknames is take the last name and half it and add an S if it's workable, like Kristen Conner's Kongs. Okay. Or Strix for Strickland. I just call them Strix. Yeah, Strix is good too. But Jair rolls. Rows. Rows. That doesn't really work. Jair's is good. Or Jeff. And that's called the nickname show. Yeah. Man, when I was listening to Oh, I can't remember what episode it was. Wow. This is almost not worth mentioning. Anyway, we were being very silly. Oh, really? I guess it was currency. It was a very silly episode. Like we just were not going to take it seriously. It didn't matter how much anybody wanted us to.

Well, that's because we had a tank of laughing gas here in the office. Oh, that was that day. I got you. So Chuck, I have a question for you. Okay. Have you ever been to see once on the Max 1 cruise? This is the first time I've ever been out to see like legit out to see. Yeah. Man, it's a weird sensation, huh? Like it is different than I thought. Especially when you can see, you know, how deep it is like on the TVs or whatever, they'll tell you how deep you are at any time. And you just think like, oh my god, there's like 3000 feet of water beneath me and nothing around me. Yeah, it is a little creepy. It is. But it's a neat sensation to agreed. Well, I take it from the fact that you didn't mention

it because I would think that you had mentioned it unsolicitedly. You didn't encounter a rogue wave. No, I would have mentioned that. I would think so. Yeah. It was very calm seas, of course. Didn't even get seasick. Oh, yeah. No, I have to, I have to tell everybody this. So you me found these things called sea bands. Oh, yeah. Did you use those? I took one, but I didn't need it. We wore them almost all the time. And I have to say, and when I didn't have it on, I could tell like, oh, I don't feel so hot. Put it on. Like five minutes later, I was totally normal. It was amazing. Yeah, I didn't have any seasickness. There was the occasional like the boat would move a little and it'd be like,

how many drinks have I had? Then I would remember, oh, I'm not in a hotel. I'm in a floating hotel. Plus I had a ton of drinks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no rogue waves, though. No rogue waves for us, either. Because they're rare. I don't know about that. They're pretty rare. I guess if you compare it to the normal number of waves, yeah, they're rare. That's what you have to compare it to. Right. But they're a lot less rare than scientists thought they were even just a couple decades ago. Yeah, that's true. So when we say rogue waves, depending on where you live in the world, you might say, what is a rogue wave? All I've ever heard of is a freak wave. Or if you live in another part of the world, you might have heard them called killer waves.

They're all the same. Or if you're a fan of the band Rogue Wave, me, you might just think it's music. You could. That's pleasing to your ear. Right. That's not what we're talking about this time. No, I just wanted to give a shout out to the rogue wave. That was very nice. In case they happen to listen. I love those guys. They have a great documentary out. Actually, their drummer almost died from a bad kidney. Wow. And PBS did this really good documentary on how a guy in a small indie band gets a new kidney and affords a new kidney. It was really great. It's called My Akin Kidney. No, I can't remember what it was called now. I saw it a few years ago.

But they're great. My left kidney. Zach Rogue is the name of the lead guy. Oh, that explains the band's name. Yeah, exactly. And I think it was his right kidney. Man, I had a 50-50 shot. Yeah, although it might be wrong. So with rogue waves, not the band, the actual wave. Yes. I guess just to define it very briefly, a rogue wave is a huge colossal wave that is is, in most definitions, twice the size of the next tallest wave in a given area that's basically described as a wall of water. Because if you're out in the open ocean, you're normally encountering swells, like the waves are rounded. So a boat can just kind of float up and down on them,

even if they are huge. Yeah, well, yeah. And you got to know what you're doing in those kind of ways. You got to drive into it, steer into it the right way and all that stuff. Right. But if you're a ship's captain, sure, you know what you're doing probably. With a rogue wave, you're in trouble because it is, again, it's like a wall of water. So it's much steeper, much flatter. And when it encounters a boat, it doesn't go under the boat. It goes over the boat. It breaks on top of it and can do some serious damage because these things are enormous. Yeah. And the key to being a rogue wave is right there in the name. It's rogue. It is a, it is, even if there's a bad storm, it is not like the other waves you're encountering.

And they come out of, seemingly come out of nowhere, which is why they've never been able to photograph or to chart them from beginning to end because you can't predict them. It's not like, well, there's a rogue wave coming. They just happen and all of a sudden you're like, oh, crap. Right. Let me get this boat steered correctly and hope it doesn't break my ship in half. Right. And like you qualified it, nobody has a photograph of it forming or a video of it forming. Yeah. Like there are a few photos here and there. And I think there is some documentary evidence from like one of those discovery shows. Yeah. There was one on Deadliest Catch, but I think they've never scientifically recorded like from beginning to end.

Right. Exactly. So no one knows where they come from, like you say. And there's some pretty cool theories, but I think you have to kind of differentiate them because people are saying at this point, well, dummies underwater earthquakes cause rogue waves. Bam. It's done. That's right. Okay. What about glacial calving? You drop a huge piece of glacier into the water, creates a giant wave, rogue wave. All right. What about coastal landslides? Okay. What's the problem here? Well, those, my friend, thank you for playing along in our little silly game. Those all can cause huge waves and some people might say, well, the rogue, but they're really not. No, they're rogue and that they're, yeah, it's a wave that's much bigger

than all the other waves around it. They're not rogue because we know where they came from. Exactly. We know who their parents are. All right. With a rogue wave, again, it just kind of comes out of nowhere. Like you said, it can be even in a storm. They're much bigger than the other huge waves, but they can also just be an enormous wave in totally calm seas, which makes them extremely mysterious. Yeah. And it depends on who you ask. There's no strict definition of how much larger it has to be. I've seen everything from 33% to three times as big as the next highest waves. So there isn't like, you know, a rank and file definition of how big it needs to be. But they've charted some big ones in February of 2000. This is

what I found is the largest ever recorded wave by science. It was off the coast of Scotland, recorded at 95 feet. It was a British research vessel. Wow. And that was using scientific instrumentation. But there are tons of anecdotal stories. Right. In fact, if you're a seaman, then you probably have one of your own or heard a million of them. You know, sailors are renowned for their stories, but rogue waves really kind of like, they're the big bang stories, you know? Yeah. It's kind of, you know, a lot of people said, well, there's such a thing as Navy strength gins. Are you sure you know what you're talking about? But every once in a while, a ship would come limping back into port and, you know, its radar antenna would be snapped off even though

it was like 90 feet above water. Yeah. And they would say it was a wave and the captain would be a known sober teetotaler who had no reason to lie. And they would say, okay, maybe there is such thing as rogue waves. But it wasn't until 1995 that the first one was recorded scientifically. That's right. And you know what? Let's talk about that right after this message. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope, but I promise you this. We have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all, and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this, and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life,

I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, like we said, Rogue Waves were considered sailors lore as far as science went until 1995 on New Year's Day off the coast of Norway, I believe. There was an oil platform called the Dropner platform, and it just happened to be recording waves that day, and it was recording waves that were about 16 to 23 feet high, about 5 to 7 meters, which I mean, that's pretty respectable. If you're a surfer, you probably want to get out on that. But then all of a sudden one passed by, and just one that was 66 feet tall,

and it was out of nowhere, and there was nothing else that came after it, and there was nothing before it, and they figured out that they had just recorded the first Rogue Wave ever captured by science. It is pretty crazy. But this is kind of coming after things, like we said, like anecdotal evidence, like there was one from the QE2, I believe. The captain, I'm not sure what year it was, but the captain described, all of a sudden this Rogue Wave comes out, and he said it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover, which has to be kind of scary. Yeah, I imagine so. The Queen Elizabeth I as well, the RMS Queen Elizabeth more specifically was in World War II, the Grey Ghost was converted to a military ship to carry troops basically,

and could carry up to 16,000 men, which is staggering at 30 knots, which is very handy. But a Rogue Wave struck that ship near Greenland in 1942, and supposedly shattered windows 90 feet above the waterline. But she survived because I saw cat power play on that ship. Oh, that was the ship, huh? Yeah, it's been docked in Long Beach since the 60s. And I went to the Altamara parties festival there by the water. And it was mainly like the big stage, but they had a second stage set up on the Queen Elizabeth, which is really neat. And I walked in and saw cat power play for like 20 minutes before I went back out to the main stage. The neat venue. Motorhead has a cruise going on really coming soon. I think this month in September. Wow. That would be pretty

awesome. That would be awesome. The QE, though, is you can stay, it's like a hotel now. Yeah. So you can stay there and eat there and see cat power there. It's also haunted, I'm sure. Well, her performance was haunting. So there was a, there's all these sailors coming back saying, this wave was crazy. And everybody's saying, no, you're the one who's crazy. But then after that 1995 capture, and they're saying, okay, there is such thing as rogue waves. And then for some reason, the 90s were like a huge boom for capturing rogue waves, improving that there was not only did they exist, there was a lot more of them than they used to think. I think people were trying more. Yeah, just like recording them more. And then they said, okay, we understand that there

is such thing as rogue waves, but we have no idea how they formed. And so they started really kind of looking into what causes a rogue wave. Yeah. And if you guys have listened to our surfing episode, which was pretty good. Yeah, it was all right. But we got into the physics of a wave. And the highlights of that are this. If you're looking at a wave, the crest, as you know, is the highest portion. The trough is the lowest portion. It's the dip in between the waves. You have the waves height, which is the distance between the trough and the crest. The distance between the crests themselves is the length of the wave. And then the wave period or wave speed is the amount of time between one crest and the next. And then what's the last

one there? Wave energy. Yeah, that's the kinetic and potential energy carried by the wave. Yes. And that is sourced from someone named Bryant. I see in the meditation. No, it's not me. So you've got what you've just described as a wave. Like, if you have all of this information, you can mathematically describe any kind of wave. And it's not just ocean waves, too. Like, this applies to optics. It applies to microwaves. Yeah. It applies to anything that takes the form of a wave. Apparently, even the stock market behaves as a wave. And a lot of this stuff applies to it. It applies to you and your break dancing. That's the worm. Isn't there a wave, too? Yeah, there's a wave, but I do the worm. Oh, okay. That's my signature move. Or if you're at a

sports stadium and you're one of those people that participates in the wave. Doing the wave, yeah. Yeah. Actually, yeah, I'm sure that this stuff would apply as well. Sure. But under normal circumstances, with just a normal wave or something, if you're out on the ocean, there are hundreds or thousands of waves all around you at any given point in time. And they're brought about by the movement of wind across water. And if there's a lot of unobstructed water, which is called fetch, that's apparently the amount of ocean that's unobstructed that the wind can blow across, and the wind is blowing strongly, and it's keeping up its breath, then you're going to have some waves form. And that's what forms a wave. Yeah. And there's other things that can impact that

wind is the major thing, but the depth of the water at the time, tides and currents, if there's an island or something in the way, that's all going to affect it. But that big open fetch is where you're going to get your big, big waves. Right. And that's just a normal wave. What they think, I should say, one of the main theories for what causes a rogue wave, because just these normal circumstances don't account for a rogue wave, right? You can point to any normal wave and be like, yeah, it's wind over this fetch and boom, there's your seven foot ocean wave, right? With a rogue wave that doesn't necessarily apply. So they think one of the proposed theories is that rogue waves form when you have a current going one way and good size wave going the other way,

say from a storm, the current pushes up the wave and basically transfers when they run into each other, it transfers some energy so that the wave just gets freakishly large for a minute, and then all of a sudden you've got your rogue wave. Yeah. So like if you have a really bad storm in a 30 foot wave and it hits something like the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream might pick it up and say, I'm going to make you larger. Yeah. Because I'm the Gulf Stream. I'm going to make you a star. But they have definitely found more evidence of rogue waves in some of these currents like the Gulf Stream on the east coast of the U.S. or the Agil-Hass. Agil-Hass. Agil-Hass. One of two. That's a current on the southward east coast of Africa. They project with math that you could get

a wave as big as 190 feet. But I don't know. But they definitely have charted a lot more waves along those streams and currents. And actually, if it is true, if it does pan out that strong currents with waves running opposite to them causes rogue waves, they're saying, well then the Gulf Stream would account for why the Bermuda Triangle has so many different disappearances. I don't know if we mentioned that and I don't think we did. We did one on the Bermuda Triangle. I'm sure we said like they were just a wave that swallowed them. But I don't know if we may have said rogue waves. It didn't stick out to me as a thing until I ran across this article though. Plus that was like 80 years ago. It was 100 years ago. There's another explanation too. And this is basically

the foundation of a mathematical principle called the peregrine soliton. Yeah, I like this one. So the peregrine soliton is named after a mathematician named peregrine. And he in the 80s predicted rogue waves. Like he mathematically proved that they were possible and showed how they would form. In the 1980s? Yes. I can't remember his first name. It was so British. So before that it was just like stories. Yes. Okay. And then this guy comes along and proves that a rogue wave can occur. And he's also even more awesome. It's not just, again, it's not just limited to ocean waves. He's saying you can have this in optics which has been proven in the lab. You can have it on the ocean which has been proven in the lab simulation. And basically

the whole thing with the peregrine soliton is that you have a normal wave and if you add just a little bit of noise to these predictable formations of a wave, you can have a freakishly large, steep wave that comes and goes fairly quickly. And that's a peregrine soliton. And they've since shown that these things can't exist. But he predicted it in like the 80s. Like a good 10 years before a rogue wave was ever recorded scientifically, Professor Peregrine came up with it. Did they name the Falcon after him too? Probably. Well, there's also the wave reinforcement. Well, this is they're related. This is part of it. Yeah. So basically waves getting together and becoming one large wave. Yeah. So that noise that you add into the normal process. Yeah. In

this case, the wave reinforcement that noise would come from other waves. Gotcha. So the idea is if let's say you have a 10 foot wave passing over a 20 foot wave, that's going to be a 30 foot wave. Yeah, that's so neat. Or it can go in the other direction. And I guess it just has to depend depends on how they meet each other. You can also subtract it. Yeah. So like a trough. Yeah. Well, that's between the crest and the lowest point of the wave. Right. Yeah. If the trough is like 15 feet and a 20 foot wave runs into that, it drops down and just becomes a five foot wave. That's all math. Yeah. But even to basic addition and subtraction, which makes it really exciting to me because I understand that kind of thing. Not me. Well, well,

addition and subtraction. Right. Yeah. Very basic. Yeah. If I have a calculator. But they're saying like if you have say five waves or 10 waves, that could be a lot of five feet high. Yeah. And the five feet high is the normal average in the area, but they all just happen to get together at this right point. Right. They're going to turn into a 50 foot wave, a single 50 foot wave. And all of a sudden you have a rogue wave that just kind of comes out of nowhere. Yeah. Or if you're in a bad storm, just a couple of large waves can form something pretty intimidating very fast. So we'll talk about how common these things might be coming up after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode

will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody care for

me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So they used to think they weren't so common. And like we said earlier, just the lore of the sailor. Navy strength, Jen. Exactly. What is Navy strength? Is that just like a higher proof? Oh my goodness. Is it good? It's too much. Too genie. No, it just destroys you. It's not good for you. I've never thought the high, high proof alcohols, like to me, adding the extra just

takes away from the flavor a little bit for me. Yeah. I can see that. Like that crazy rum that's like Navy strength rum. Yeah, I guess so. It is. It's like fire water. Yeah. It's Navy strength rum and Navy strength, Jen. It used to be part of the British sailors rations. There's only one reason to drink that stuff. But I mean, it went away for a reason. And then they brought it back and it's, it's just crazy stuff. It's crazy. They brought it back for college students. I mean, there's, I can't remember who makes it. I think Leopold's might make a Navy strength, Jen. Yeah. It's, it's rough. And I love Leopold's, Jim, but there any Navy strength, Jen, I think would just be too much for me. Yeah, you get a little older and you're not impressed by that

stuff. You know, like when you're in college, though, that's when you're like, this is 5,000 proof, right? We're going to put it in some Kool-Aid and none of us are going to remember tonight. Nobody better be putting Leopold's, Jen and Kool-Aid. Yeah. I will find you. Look to your nearest college campus because it's probably happening. So anyway, like we said, they used to think they were pretty rare, but in 2004, the European Space Agency started collecting data from satellites. And they basically want to see like how often do these occur. I've seen some different estimates from three in 10,000 in the ocean to three in 1,000 near coastal inlets and river mouths. But I think what they found with their Max Wave project was

10 waves, 82 feet or higher. And that's from the ESA's data. Right. And that was over a period of three weeks. But the thing is, is the previous weather data collection predicted that you get one every like 50 years. Yeah. And all of a sudden they saw 10 in three weeks. So they're like, okay, these things are way more common than we thought. And like I said, they started to think, well, maybe this accounts for a lot of disappearances. Yeah. One thing they're going to try and do with another program called Wave Atlas is do surveys over a longer period of time, which makes a lot of sense, of course, because that could have been a really rough three weeks. Yes, it could have. It's like I was looking into shipping containers because a rogue wave caused two of the worst

shipping container losses in recent history. Really? Or rogue waves did. I should say it wasn't just one. And I should say it's not necessarily just one. Apparently mathematically, it's also predicted that rogue waves tend to occur in threes for some reason. And I couldn't find out why. But if you look at the record that Edmund Fitzgerald, the account of that from the captain of the Arthur Andersen, which is the ship that was going along what lake... Erie, I think, wasn't it? Was it? Superior. Superior. They were out in a storm in November 1975. And the Arthur Andersen was hit by two 35-foot waves, which is huge for the Great Lakes. Yeah. And they lost sight of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And the next thing they know, it's on the bottom of

the Lake Superior, broken in two. And they were like, well, clearly the rogue wave took it down. Yeah. But there were two of them that night. And apparently there were plenty of accounts of not just one, but more than one rogue wave coming out of the blue. Well, and we got a great song out of it. Gordon Lightfoot, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. That's so odd. I guess that was just the time. But it seems weird that you'd get a big radio hit about a shipwreck. That was when the AM stations dominated. Yeah. He's Canadian, too. So that might explain a lot. I read a good article today on the lost art of the fade-out in songs. Oh, yeah. It was pretty cool. Slate did a good article on it and how, you know,

the biggest hits of the 60s and 70s and into the 80s even had those great fade-outs. Yeah. You don't hear it anymore. No. Well, one of the reasons why is because it's so awkward to try to do that live. Like, do you remember when Davy Jones guested on the Brady Bunch? Marshall was trying to get him to play the prom. He does a rendition of Girl. And then it fades out at the end while he's singing. And he's like kind of singing like more softly. Well, that's because he's lip-syncing to the recorded version. Right. Right. But I mean, like live, they would end them differently. Yeah. But he was supposedly in the studio and it's like fading as he's recording. It was just awkward to see. And you

could tell he felt uncomfortable. It's very awkward for Davy. So I think one of the last things we should cover is the differentiation between a rogue wave and a tsunami. We've done a podcast on tsunamis and the main differences is where it comes from and where it happens. Tsunamis aren't typically a 90-foot wall of water. A lot of times it's a five-foot wall of water that just has such force and speed coming ashore that it does all kinds of damage. Well, yeah, depending on when, where you see it. Because rather than a wave, like a normal wave, where the energy is carried on top of the water because the wind whipped it up there, the tsunami is generated underwater so the energy carries beneath the water. So when it hits

that coast, all of a sudden it's pushed upward and you have a huge wall of water. But out in the ocean you're like, look at how fast that three-foot wave is traveling. Yeah, exactly. That's a tsunami. Plus again, we know what caused the tsunami so it's not a rogue wave and it's again not a huge towering wave on top of the water until it hits the coastline. That's right. And if you're a ship, you know, they can build you better and stronger to encounter harsher waves, but they're never going to start building ships to withstand rogue waves because they're, you know, they don't encounter them that often. And there's really nothing you can do if you come across a 90-foot wave. Yeah. I mean, the Empire State Building from the bottom to the, you know, kind of where the square

part ends is 111 feet. Could you imagine seeing a wave as tall as the Empire State Building? No. You can't build a ship that can withstand that. So basically your ballast is your stability and they can build you as secure as possible, but there's really not much you can do except steer it as best you can and cross your fingers and pray. But also, you know, a greater understanding of how rogue waves come about could, you know, lead to improved safety, less loss of life. Yeah, maybe prediction I think is the next wave, if you will. Like, that's the only thing that's going to be able to help is if you even a five-minute heads up, like, this thing might be forming somewhere nearby. Or sail around this area. Yeah, exactly. Because that's a rogue wave city. Yeah. And no

Opelio crab is worth it. You know, I saw this article, somebody did a study about shipping containers and the effect they have when they go overboard. And apparently they provide nice little ecosystems when they hit the bottom of the ocean. Like, they went and checked and they're like, oh, okay, that's pretty great. Everything's just fine. They like the shipping containers down there. Well, they're artificial reefs, right? Yeah, inadvertent ones. So that's it for rogue waves. If you want to learn more about it, you can type those two words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this help for my future. We've gotten a few of these where people ask for

you know, like, what should I do with my life? So I'm going to read another one. First time email or long time listener guys, I want to say your show has been with me through some very hard times. Your humor friendship and connection with your fans got me through the passing of my grandfather and a very hard breakup. So thanks for that. What I was hoping you could help me out with was this one more thing. I feel lost with the path I am on in life. I'm a recent college grad from Western Washington U with a bachelor's in history and a minor in web design. I'm now out in the working world and I find it hard to decide what I want to do with my life. I've listened to past episodes where you answer fans who have written in. So I thought I'd give it a shot. Let it be

clear. I am not a struggling college graduate. I've landed a steady, secure desk job. But after the first couple of months, it's lost its luster and I feel myself becoming the stereotypical corporate drone. I'm impressed by the position you two have found yourself in. I want to know what advice you have for a young professional and scholar in this world on your career that has the potential to be fulfilling, more fulfilling than creating spreadsheets and TPS reports. That is from Kyle. TPS reports really exist? Or is that just like? I think people just use that phrase because they catch all from office space. Gotcha. But it might be a real thing. That's Kyle. Yeah, Kyle. I thought about this a little bit. My advice to you is to not quit your

job, but to do your soul searching on someone else's dime for a little while. If you've got a good job, you're way ahead of a lot of other people. Yeah, true. So don't go quitting your job and saying, you know, I want to go open up a glamping operation in Colorado. What's glamping? Oh, it's the new thing with like high quality camping. Oh, it's like the new butcher thing? Yes, we're like a, you know, you'll have a nice canvas tent in the woods with an actual bed and a rug and a lamp and a refrigerator. And you charge people to go stay there. It sounds very nice. Yeah. It's not camping. It's glamping. But, um, yeah, Kyle. So I would not suggest you like, go quit your job and run off and join the circus. How about that? That's easier. Kyle, I never have a heads up on

stuff like this. So I never have any decent advice, but I definitely would side with Chuck on that one. Like if you, if you've got stability right now, that doesn't mean you're trapped. You're never trapped. Right. Like figure out what you want to do, figure out what you can make decent money at that will make you happy. If it's not the job you're in, then there's your answer. Go figure out what that is, but do it in the context of your current job as well. It's, it's almost across the board a bad idea to just quit your job and then figure out what you're going to do. Like that's not smart. Yeah. And these emails are sometimes stuff because Kyle, I can't decide what you like and what you enjoy. If you had written in and said, boy, I really love drawing cartoons

or roller skating and long walks on the beach. Right. But I am a corporate drone, then I would say, Hey, maybe try and be a cartoonist. So you need to think about sir, what you enjoy in life, what inspires you. And there's probably a job scenario that fits that description. Yeah. And don't be discouraged about having a history degree and not using it. Like that it's becoming more and more prevalent to have a degree that you don't necessarily use. It just made you a more well rounded and interesting person. Yeah. And you learn the skills that you need to survive after college in college, no matter what your degree was. Yeah. And you can always go to how stuff works.com and look at the careers page. We actually

have a careers page that is updated. And if they say there's jobs, there's jobs. Boom. Because I kind of feel like I was asking a little bit for a job. Maybe. Well, thanks a lot, Kyle. We wish you the best of luck and to everybody who finds himself or herself in a position similar to Kyle's. We are crossing our fingers for you guys and sending you good vibes. And if you want to say hi to us in the interim, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And you can hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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