For the next few days this will be Osborne’s private ocean. He’ll be both Aeolus and Neptune, but his ability to create walls of water will depend solely on the soundness of his physics. Rogues are more events than waves, he believes. They arise from the unstable energy present in otherwise normal waves, like a monstrous sound blaring suddenly from the predictable harmonics of an orchestra. Osborne believes that he can make such waves appear when and where he wants. And if he can do that, perhaps he can predict their occurrence in the real world. “We’re going to be making magic,” he says.

Photograph by Jennifer Tzar

TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT

In a wave tank at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, a three-foot-long model ship is effortlessly capsized by a simulated rogue wave. In real seas, waves like these sink one supertanker or freighter every year.


Osborne has studied rogue waves for 20 years, but physicists have known about them for much longer than that. In 1832 the Scottish engineer John Scott Russell was riding along a canal in Edinburgh when he saw a bow wave form behind a horse-drawn canal boat. It moved “at great velocity,” he later reported at the 1844 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a well-defined heap of water which continued its course along the channel.” Russell followed the wave on horseback for nearly two miles. It never changed shape or slowed down.

The sight would obsess Russell for the rest of his life. “He was going around talking about a column of water that propagates itself,” Osborne says. “Miraculous. But it nearly destroyed his career. It took 70 years before it was solved. And it was solved like a problem in quantum mechanics. This beast, this solitary wave, this soliton, as they called it, was behaving like a particle.”

FUZZY BEAST

 

In the 3-D computer simulation below, a rogue wave rises suddenly from turbulent waters during an ocean storm. The wave crest (in red) towers a full 90 feet above mean sea level. Physicist Alfred Osborne views such monster waves as “fuzzy beasts lying between sine waves and solitons.” But unlike solitons, which generally travel great distances without losing speed or changing shape,

rogue waves can remain hidden behind a background of random waves (blue and green), only to rise up with sudden violence.

Solitons defy Newtonian logic. They are coherent structures that somehow emerge from a random background—structures with properties far different from those of the waves around them. When a soliton is moving fast, it can overtake a smaller soliton and pass through it unchanged. Since Russell’s discovery, scientists have found solitons everywhere there is wave motion. Telephone signals ride solitons in fiber-optic cables, enabling them to move unchanged across vast distances. Solitons have been found in the electrical activity of cardiac tissue and in the electromagnetism that affects the ionized gases, or plasma, that make up most of the visible universe.

But rogue waves are not exactly solitons. Osborne says that they lie somewhere in the hierarchy between sine waves and solitons. His first glimpse of one came in 1999, when he saw a graph of the data on a wave that had struck a drilling rig in the North Sea on New Year’s Day in 1995. The wave was 85 feet high and half as broad as a football field. It arose out of a storm-tossed sea of 30-foot waves and swept across the deck of the rig at 45 miles per hour.

It was perhaps the largest ocean wave ever measured. By the high standards of the Norwegian oil industry, it was an event that occurs only once in 10,000 years. The U.S. Coast Guard considers rogue waves so rare that it doesn’t even keep records of their occurrence. Yet maritime records are filled with stories of fishermen and sailors who claim to have been struck by them. Some of these stories are probably exaggerated. As one marine insurer put it, “If a captain loses a ship or crew in rough waters, they blame it on a rogue wave rather than admit they were out when they shouldn’t have been out.” But many rogue stories are not exaggerated.

Reports from the Norwegian and British shipping industry suggest that rogue waves sink one supertanker or freighter every year. Rod Rainey, an engineer who investigates ship damage, told the BBC that a storm wave 12 meters high hits a ship with a force of 6 tons per square meter. A ship can take a hit of 15 tons per square meter without damage; 30 tons per square meter will dent it. A rogue wave can bring 100 tons per square meter down on a ship. “That,” says Rainey, “will hole it.”