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.