Courtesy of NOAA |
Alfred Osborne’s style is not to do one thing at a time. At the moment he is trying to get a major wave experiment going at a huge tank in Trondheim, Norway. But his PC refuses to communicate with his Mac. And while he’s working on that, he’s trying to revise some formulas that will drive the waves in the tank. His young colleagues from Turin, Italy—Miguel Onorato and Carlo Brandini, both unshaven, uncombed, and turned out in travel-worn attire—make suggestions in Italian, then pass Osborne a pen and a paper full of equations. He answers in English, redoes the equations, and passes back the pen and paper. They respond in English. He answers in Italian with a Texas twang. It’s a bit as if they were in the middle of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western—only this film is called A Fistful of Formulas. The intense man with silvery hair and blue eyes has the Clint Eastwood role, and he doesn’t need dubbing.
Osborne is a long way from home—or homes. There is the one in Texas, where he was born and once worked for NASA; the one in Virginia, where he worked at the U.S. Office of Naval Research; and the one in Turin, where he teaches at the University of Torino and his wife and children live. He is in Trondheim to make waves. Big waves. The kind made famous in The Perfect Storm that sink ships and drown sailors, many of them in the cold North Sea that stretches southwest of the Trondheim waterfront. Called rogues or freaks, such waves are the stuff of mariners’ nightmares—towering, steep-faced walls of water that weigh millions of tons. Waves so unexpected they leave no time for escape, so powerful they can take out even supertankers and oil rigs.
Two thousand years ago, rogue waves were considered the work of angry gods like Neptune or Aeolus. More recently, seamen and engineers alike have dismissed them as easily explainable: If you know the speed and direction of the wind, if you know the distance over which it has been blowing and the depth of the water, you can predict the height, length, speed, and even the frequency of any wave. Two 10-foot waves become a 20-foot wave; two 20-foot waves become a 40-foot wave; but the waves can only grow so high before their energy dissipates and gravity takes them down.
There is only one problem: The wave models that offshore engineers have used for decades almost never come up with a rogue wave. They can make big waves, but not ones that rise—as rogue waves do—three to five times as high as the waves around them and seem to come out of nowhere, out of sync with the rest of the sea, from a direction completely different from that of the wind and other waves. Waves that big are, in the understated lexicon of naval architects, “nonnegotiable.” Perhaps they are mythological. Perhaps the memories of the mariners who lived to describe them were unreliable. The math says those waves are nearly impossible. But then again, few people have concentrated on ocean waves, not in an age of quantum mechanics, superstrings, and other mysteries. As Osborne says, “Nobody was going to win a Nobel Prize for studying ocean waves.” Unless, perhaps, you could re-create them somewhere other than the ocean.
The Trondheim wave tank is a raw industrial space, with concrete walls 30 feet high, 30 feet wide, and as long as a football field. When Carl Stansberg, the slim Norwegian engineer who runs the facility, arrives to escort us to it, I ask him what he thinks of Osborne’s attempts to create rogue waves. He smiles coolly and says, “We will see.” Osborne’s swagger seems a bit subdued as we wind our way through the laboratories and testing pools, past scale models of tankers and oil platforms detailed down to the company logos painted on their sides (no photos allowed). Wave tanks are where engineering is put to the test and theory can take a beating.
Onorato and Brandini are already at work when we arrive. They are standing on a steel footbridge raised several feet above the water, with an impressive bank of controls and computer terminals. Below, the water in the dark wave tank is so clear and still that it reflects without distortion the array of fluorescent ceiling fixtures above. Staring into the tank from the bridge, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m looking at water.
