Encounter with freak wave
On Saturday 16 April 2005, the Norwegian Dawn encountered a 70-foot (21 m) freak wave after sailing into rough weather off the coast of Georgia. It damaged several windows on the 9th and 10th decks. Several decks were flooded, but there was only minimal damage.
Fortunately for them, the ship got smacked from the bow to stern. Had it hit broadside, the builders and experts agreed that we would have witnessed the first Poseidon adventure in real life.
http://www.roblightbody.com/liners/qe-2/1995_freak_wave.htmBut roughly two ships each week are affected. Rosenthal and colleagues at GKSS have spent several years looking at 30,000 satellite images of the ocean surface taken by two European Space Agency satellites over a three-week period in 2001. The satellite images were processed at the Cologne-based German Aerospace Center. This research was part of a European Union program called MaxWave, started in 2000 to document the occurrence of rogue waves.
With this and other studies, researchers want to develop a wave map covering more than a decade of observations of the world's oceans. The map could be used to forecast the likelihood of the giant waves' appearance. While forecasting rogue waves can be very complex, the goal of the global satellite measurement project is to improve forecasting by looking at the differences between wave models and actual observations, said Wolfgang Lengert, ERS mission manager for the European Space Agency, Sinking Ships During the last two decades, more than 200 supertankersships over 200 meters (656 feet) longhave sunk beneath the waves.
Rogue waves are thought to be the cause for many of these disasters, perhaps by flooding the main hold of these giant container ships. In a single week in winter 2001, two tourist ships were hit by rogue waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen and the Caledonian Star had their bridge windows smashed by the errant wall of water reaching 30 meters (98 feet) high. "For tourist ships, they like to have these large windows so that people can look out," said Susanne Lehner, a mathematician at the University of Miami in Florida who studies wave dynamics. For the Bremen, water pouring in the smashed windows damaged the ship's instruments and power, setting it adrift for two hours while the crew worked to restart the engines.
"The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels: two large ships sink every week on average," said Rosenthal in an ESA press release. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather.'" In 1978, when the 43,000-ton cargo ship Mūnchen went down with all hands during an Atlantic crossing, all that remained was a battered lifeboat. Now researchers suspect the sinking likely happened after the ship was hit with a rogue wave.
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