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Giant waves seen from space - able to sink ships

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Originally posted by: jagec
Originally posted by: Pacfanweb
Funny how our Navy never loses ships to these waves.
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Would they tell anyone if they did? Doubt it...the only thing they can't cover up is if something like a carrier went down, and considering how few of those they have (and that they're much more unsinkable than your average merchanter)...
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Common sense is out the window eh? Exactly how would you cover it up when you reported a few thousand sailors killed in action to their families? (Keeping in mind that millitary families live together)
 
Originally posted by: fredtam
Originally posted by: smilingcrow
The BBC viewed a documentary on this last year. I think the initial interest in the subject was triggered by abnormally large waves being detected hitting oil rigs. It was highly technical in places and sparked my imagination as it was proposing correlations between these wave formations and a particular mathematical function, which I can't for the life of me remember. Not that many of you would be intereted I guess. I used to do research in pattern matching in the human voice, so it grabbed my attention.
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Link to show summary/ transcripts.
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Thanks for the link. It's an excellent synopsis of the program and answered my question about what mathematical function was involved. Cheers.
 
Originally posted by: Eli
Originally posted by: Stark
let me mark "trans-oceanic ship crossing" off my list of things to do before I die.

I wonder why the waves never hit land masses?
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I was wondering the same thing.
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Actually, freak waves have hit some Pacific Islands, killing dozens and destroying small villages.
 
One thing mentioned in the article that's very noteworthy, imo, is that these are readings taken over only three weeks, and only 15 sq. miles of ocean.
 
Originally posted by: notfred
Watch a couple of these videos and then tell me why they needed to waste satellites on this.
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Completely different phenomena, This is looking at deep water waves. The waves that cause those huge breakers close to shore are just broad gentle rises out in deep water. Besides, I'm guestimating the size of the waves there to be on the order of 50' to 60' high based on the guy in the picture. That's about half the size of what they are talking about here.
 
Originally posted by: rahvin
Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski<BR>There was a discovery show about mega tsunamis. There was one in an Alaskan Bay that was 500-1000 feet high, and wiped out an entire forest and erroded the soil away from the mountain it ran into. Happened in the late 50's. It was caused by a land slide.
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<BR><BR>Talk about hugely oversimplified! The 1950's wave you are discussing was a landslide that hit a freshwater lake and bounced the lake into the ocean over the landmass that contained the freshwater lake (the landmass containing it was something like 300ft wide. The interesting part about that story is the two guys in the fishing boat that were in the lake when the landslide hit it, if I remember correctly, they ended up 2 miles out to sea and completely unharmed. <BR><BR>Tsunamis are almost always triggered by two events, an underwater landslide, or an earthquake that involves a dramatic shift in elevation on the sea floor.
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nope, the wave came into a inlet where the fishermen were.
 
Originally posted by: Ikonomi
The October issue of Popular Science has a little thing about rogue waves. I've scanned it, if anyone is interested:

http://www.ikonomi.com/images/roguewave1.jpg

http://www.ikonomi.com/images/roguewave2.jpg
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Great stuff. It also explains why you don't see these waves on land. The collision type of waves only occur where two wave fronts meet and do not travel anywhere. The additive type does travel but either 1) crashes over dissapting the wave energy or 2) if the rogue wave is composed of multiple waves the component wave will soon separate out and the rogue wave will only have a short lifespan. Real bummer if you get caught in it......
 
Originally posted by: LordMorpheus
The huge waves people surf are nowhere near that large out at sea, its when they start running up a shore that they get large.<BR><BR>Rogue waves just occur when three or for normal waves just happen to be at the same spot at the same time, their heights are, for all practicle purposes, additive, so you have a crest or a trough three or four times as large as normal.<BR><BR>I guess you could get even more waves piled together for an even freakier occurance.
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wave amplitude is additive - simple physics. good description LordMorpheus.
 
There was a cool program on the national geographic channel this weekend about the bermuda triangle. One theory to many ships and planes dissapearances is that the bernuda triangles' ocean floor is filled with methane, and if a large enough eruption (about 1/2 the volume of the ship) is released right below the ship, it can easily sink it in a matter of seconds. Also, if a low-flying aircraft was to go through a pocket of air that had even 1% methane, the engines would stall and the plane would litterally fall from the sky. It was pretty interesting.
 
Originally posted by: Beau
There was a cool program on the national geographic channel this weekend about the bermuda triangle. One theory to many ships and planes dissapearances is that the bernuda triangles' ocean floor is filled with methane, and if a large enough eruption (about 1/2 the volume of the ship) is released right below the ship, it can easily sink it in a matter of seconds. Also, if a low-flying aircraft was to go through a pocket of air that had even 1% methane, the engines would stall and the plane would litterally fall from the sky. It was pretty interesting.
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Now let's see if they can prove it. That would be a pretty cool show to watch.
 
Originally posted by: Beau
There was a cool program on the national geographic channel this weekend about the bermuda triangle. One theory to many ships and planes dissapearances is that the bernuda triangles' ocean floor is filled with methane, and if a large enough eruption (about 1/2 the volume of the ship) is released right below the ship, it can easily sink it in a matter of seconds. Also, if a low-flying aircraft was to go through a pocket of air that had even 1% methane, the engines would stall and the plane would litterally fall from the sky. It was pretty interesting.
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It would take a whole lot of methane released at once, considering the volume of air most planes take in, and the volume of air around the plane that would have to contain the gas, what with it dissapating into the rest of the atmosphere and all. I wonder if it would be possible to calculate how large a methane release would be required to make this scenario plausible and then probe the area for the possiblity? This is really interesting stuff, not typical of OT. 😀
 
Originally posted by: CPA
Originally posted by: Beau
There was a cool program on the national geographic channel this weekend about the bermuda triangle. One theory to many ships and planes dissapearances is that the bernuda triangles' ocean floor is filled with methane, and if a large enough eruption (about 1/2 the volume of the ship) is released right below the ship, it can easily sink it in a matter of seconds. Also, if a low-flying aircraft was to go through a pocket of air that had even 1% methane, the engines would stall and the plane would litterally fall from the sky. It was pretty interesting.
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Now let's see if they can prove it. That would be a pretty cool show to watch.
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They proved it on models of ocean going freighters in a wave pool (discovery show). If the underwater bubble hit the right part of the ship, it went down in a heartbeat.

They also explained how a plane's engine would choke/explode because of the change in gasses in the air.
 
Originally posted by: sharkeeper
It also explains why you don't see these waves on land.
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IF you see a wave on land, you have BIG trouble! 😛

Cheers!
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Ooops, slight grammatical issue there. 😱

Rewrite as "It also explains why you don't see these waves approching land."
 
Originally posted by: ThePresence
Originally posted by: notfred<BR>Watch a couple if these videos and then tell me why they needed to waste satellites on this.
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<BR><BR>:shocked:
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:shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked::shocked:
 
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