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I have good news in the weekend forecast for South Florida… It won’t rain. However, I was actually hoping to talk about a warming trend… Sadly, we are not going to be shooting up into the 80s this weekend. In fact, temperatures look like they will remain a bit below normal until perhaps the middle of next week. Did I mention spring is just a little over 2 weeks away? Well, it is. Anyway, let’s discuss something else now.
I have mentioned a few times before that it seems to me like we may be entering a period of increased earthquake activity, or at least an increase in larger events. I realize this is not the first time the earth has experienced several fair sized earthquakes over the course of a few months, a lot of conflicting opinions exist, and I am certainly no expert. Still, a good deal of information seems to indicate many of the known faults are at or beyond their ‘normal schedule’, and could release energy at nearly any time now. I am certainly not going to make any predictions here, but there is some talk of a large event taking place in Oregon (within the next 50 years), so is another West Coast Earthquake looming in the not so distant future? I guess we can only wait and see, since the science of predicting these events is far from advanced.
One last thing, I had intended on posting this as a separate article, but decided to include it here in light of the incident off the coast of Spain involving a cruise ship. I recently read an article by Steve Lyons (TWC) on rogue waves and must admit I felt the tone of the article and the information presented downplayed a serious situation that goes far beyond a wave on the beach that gets your towel wet. It is true that anyone who watches the wave’s crash on a beach will notice the size of waves will vary, sometimes quite a bit. The same holds true for any boaters out there, I am sure you have been anchored at your favorite spot and had a series of waves move by for no apparent reason that almost makes you wonder if some weather was churning up, only to have them calm back down to the norm within a few minutes. I can also understand that occasionally this natural cycle will produce a wave that is much larger than the average. What the good doctor’s article fails to mention is that the danger posed by a true rogue wave in the open ocean goes far beyond getting your trousers wet during a walk along the beach.
Many factors are at work when we talk about ‘what makes waves’, and in general the answer is ‘wind makes waves’. However, the overall picture is much more complex than that, any underwater volcanic or earthquake activity can also play a role, the largest example of that being a Tsunami, but much smaller events can also contribute to wave height. Of more significance would seem to be the topography of the ocean floor and ocean currents. Not being an expert on ocean waves, and having only the knowledge that anyone who has watched the various shows on this phenomenon would, it appears that these factors can combine in certain areas, creating ‘hot spots’ for large rogue waves, such as the coast of South Africa. This does not preclude large waves from occurring nearly anyplace, and recent information from satellites seems to indicate that massive rogue waves are not really that uncommon. This is in stark contrast to only a short time ago, when scientists refused to believe in rogue waves at all, and captains of ships would not even report them because stories of 100 foot waves were put in the same class as sea monsters and other crazy or drunken tales from the sea.
Today we have learned that these large waves do exist, are mostly unpredictable and of course, pose a very real danger to any ship that might encounter one. We also somewhat understand how they are created. Lyons did do well in explaining how random waves really are and that when waves of a different direction or speed encounter each other it will have the effect of either adding to wave size, or subtracting from it. Simple math tried to calculate the size and frequency of ‘rogue waves’ based on a very limited understanding of these forces, and those calculations were apparently wrong when they were used to make the claim that a 100 foot wave in otherwise stable seas would be so rare it need not be considered. In reality however, it seems that all the factors we have discussed, along with one wave somehow being able to steal energy from it’s immediate neighbors, can lead to a monster wave, and this happens much more frequently than some would like to admit.
