Horizon (1964–…): Season 39, Episode 1 - Freak Wave - full transcript
There is something out at sea
terrorising the world's shipping.
Out of the darkness
came this great wall of water.
I have never seen a wave
as big as this in my whole life.
It can strike out of the blue
with devastating consequences.
You hit solid water
and it is like running into a brick wall.
The entire bridge was wrecked.
Horrific, monstrous.
You feel as if
the end of the world has come.
This is the story of a wave
that is sinking ships around the world,
a killer that defies all scientific understanding
and that no ship is designed to withstand.
It is one of the best kept
secrets of the sea,
that once a week a ship sinks
to the bottom of the ocean,
often without Mayday or any clue
as to what happened.
One of the most mysterious of these
disappearances is that of the Munchen.
The Munchen was a vast
new type of cargo ship,
the length of 2¨ö football pitches
she was the pride of
the German merchant navy.
On 7 December 1978
she set sail on a routine trip to America.
On board were 27 crew,
including Uwe Hinrichs.
This was my son Uwe,
20 years old.
He liked going to sea.
He said it was the safest ship
in the world.
Everybody said it was unsinkable,
the best ship in the world.
That night in December
there was a giant storm
raging across the Atlantic.
The waves were the size of houses,
but that would not have troubled
the Munchen.
For a ship so powerful and well maintained
such storms were just routine.
It was assumed that all was well
and going to schedule,
until 3 AM
on the night of 12 December.
It was an SOS from the Munchen.
She was in trouble and needed help,
but at this stag no-one
was too alarmed
because even if damaged
the powerful Munchen could float for days.
At the beginning we were very calm.
I told myself this
couldn't happen to the Munchen.
It's so safe.
Everything had been taken care of.
They'd thought about everything.
Within hours search and rescue planes
were sent to find her
and all the ships in the busy shipping route
came to join in the search.
Like a police hunt,
they were lined up three miles apart
combing vast areas of the ocean
for the Munchen.
It was the biggest search
in the history of shipping.
In charge was Captain Pieter de Nijs.
We hoped to find the ship,
or at least people or a lifeboat,
a life raft with people and we never found
any living soul
which every day became
more disappointing.
All that was recovered
was an empty lifeboat and some wreckage.
That a ship can be in trouble
that can happen to any ship.
It happens all the time
everywhere now and then,
but that it completely disappeared,
that such a big modern ship
could disappear
that was surprising.
For some reason the great ship
and her crew had disappeared
off the face of the earth
and no-one could understand why.
An investigation started immediately,
going over every detail of her design
and the few remains that had been found.
The only clue to what happened
was found on the recovered lifeboat.
Normally it hung 20 metres
above the waterline
and it was one of the tiny metal pins
that it hung from
that drew the investigators' attention.
One of them was Werner Hummel.
The key actually to what,
what could have happened to the Munchen
is the forward block
of the starboard lifeboat.
The, which is shown here on, on this picture.
We see here on the pictures these steel pins,
pins bent from forward to aft.
This indicates
that the boat hanging underneath
was struck by a tremendous force
forward aft
which caused these bendings
of these rather strong steel pins.
Some huge force had hurled the lifeboat
out of its metal pins
20m up above sea-level,
but what this force was
was a mystery.
The Maritime Court could only conclude
that bad weather caused an unusual event
which led to the sinking of the ship
but many mariners suspected
they knew what sunk the Munchen,
something that according to legend
sinks a huge number of ships every year:
a freak wave.
The freak, or rogue, wave
is one of the great myths of the sea.
All my sea career I've been
hearing stories about rogue waves.
Mariners talk of a single breaking wave
the size of a tower block
that can rear up out of nowhere.
It was colossal.
At least 80ft high,
probably even bigger.
We estimate the height of the wave
30 metres.
It looked enormous,
it looked like a white cliff.
It was just like a mountain,
a wall of water coming against us.
I've never seen a wave
as big as this in my whole life.
It's not a tsunami or tidal wave,
it's not caused by earthquakes
or giant landslides.
No-one knows where it comes from
or why it happens.
The freak wave is a huge,
steep wave coming out of the blue
without any prediction,
any expectations.
It's just there.
But there's one small problem
with all these stories.
According to all scientific knowledge
of the sea
freak waves are practically impossible.
Scientists have understood ocean waves
for centuries.
They are simply made by the wind.
The stronger the wind and the longer it blows
the bigger the waves.
In order to predict the biggest wave
a ship will meet
scientists use a set of mathematical equations
called the Linear Model.
This says that in any sea condition
there is a limit
to how big the largest wave will be
and that mariners tales of monster waves
that come out of nowhere
have got to be wrong.
Mariners are like fishermen aren't they.
I mean they,
sure they come back from the sea
and they tell all kinds of interesting stories
and people look at them suspiciously.
It's sort of like
you know the fish that got away
and he says oh that was 10 metres long,
you know.
Well waves are sort of the same.
Jim Gunson of the Met Office
uses the Linear Model to explain
why freak waves shouldn't exist.
Using the Linear Model
for a given sea state
this bell-shaped graph gives
the probability of a certain wave height
and it's like the inner population
of children in a class.
There is an average height of the children
and most children are around that height.
Some are quite a bit taller or shorter,
but there's, the chance that a child is,
is three or four times
the height of the average child
is very, very small.
So according to the Linear Model
even in a fierce storm
where average wave height may be 12 metres
the chance of meeting
a 30m wall of water
is practically zero.
Using the Linear Model for a 12m sea state
the chance of finding a 30m
trough to crest wave height
is 10 to the minus 5 which is 0.00001.
To put it in perspective the chan,
a wave like that would come along
using the Linear Model
once every 10,000 years.
The Linear Model is so well accepted
that the entire multi-billion pound
shipping industry relies on it.
Meteorologists use it to predict wave height
and naval architects to calculate ship's strength
and the biggest wave used in
ship design is just 15m.
The idea that there might be
freak waves out there
seemed impossible.
Instead any mysterious
disappearances at sea
have been blamed on far likely culprits,
like corrosion and human error,
but then one day something happened
that forced scientists
to look again
at their ideas about ocean waves.
On New Year's Day 1995
a storm was brewing in the North Sea.
The Draupner oil rig was 100 miles out
in the harshest of weather.
The sensors were regularly
reading waves of 12m
when suddenly out of the blue
came a wave that was so high and so steep
scientists had thought it was impossible.
For me it changed everything,
really changed everything.
This wave is at 26m.
It's so much bigger than
the background sea state.
When the New Year's Day wave came along
which fits this picture,
a 30m crest to trough height
in a 12m sea state,
alarm bells started going off
because of the very low probability
of this wave,
yet we saw it.
The sensors measured a wave so steep
and so high it should only occur once
in every 10,000 years.
Suddenly it seemed that the mariners
might be right after all.
The New Year wave shocked wave experts.
Among them Julian Wolfram.
He has spent years since then studying
the same part of the North Sea
looking for more freak waves.
What we need to do
is to study waves like this
because we need to know how frequently
they occur because if they occur quite frequently
they could actually pose a serious danger
to offshore structures and ships.
Wolfram was looking for any waves
that were bigger than the Linear Model
would predict
and to measure them
he installed a radar device
looking down to the sea's surface.
We have a device which faces down
to the surface of the sea
and basically sends out an electric pulse,
hits the surface of the water
and comes back again
and we time the amount of time
it takes to go down
and come back and from that
we can estimate the distance from
the radar to the wave
and we do that continuously
so we actually get the profile
of the surface.
Over four years
Wolfram measured every large wave
that hit the platform
and when he plotted the size
of these waves
compared to the height
of the waves around them
he found something completely unexpected.
The Linear Model predicts
that when you plot
the height of individual waves
relative to the waves either side
they should all lie on a straight line
and when the average size
of the waves were small
the Linear Model held true,
but he found 24 waves
that veered well above the line.
These biggest waves occurred
far more frequently
than the Linear Model predicted.
It appeared that these 24 waves
were a completely
different sort of beast.
One of the things we learn
when we plotted out the graph
was that in fact the really extreme waves
are different from
the slightly smaller waves.
They have different characteristics,
they tend to be significantly steeper,
they also tend to be higher than
we would normally expect
based on the ordinary theories
we've used up to date.
They're unusual,
they are freak waves.
It seemed Wolfram really had found
the rogue wave of mariners' myth.
For the shipping industry
Wolfram's research
could have been a disaster.
If there really were
freak waves out there
then potentially billions of dollars
were at risk.
It could mean having to redesign
every single ship.
With so much at stake
scientists needed to understand
what was going on.
Where did freak waves come from
and was there any way
of predicting them?
Searching for clues
they looked at where mariners
have reported seeing freak waves
and found one place
where they seemed to happen
over and over again - South Africa.
The southern cape of Africa
is a major shipping route
with millions of tons of cargo
being shifted every year.
The seas here may look calm
but for years they have been
notorious to sailors
for the ferocity of their waves.
Captain Dai Davies is one of the leading
salvage experts in South Africa.
He's seen the damage these waves
can cause dozens of times.
The Neptune Sapphire was a brand new vessel
on her maiden voyage.
It was as if a cutting torch had cut
the ship in half completely.
Atlas Pride happened in horrific weather.
This big wave just came out of nowhere,
hit the bow and destroyed the whole bow.
Mimosa was a very big vessel.
The ship's side plating was punched in,
completely smashed in
causing a hole to be formed
you could fit three double-decker
buses into.
When I went aboard the ship
to carry out the salvage
the Captain, who was
a very experienced Norwegian Master,
said it was the biggest wave
he'd ever seen in his life,
he'd ever seen.
Since 1990, 20 ships
have been devastated by rogue waves
off the coast of South Africa.
Scientists like Marten Grundlingh
decided to find out
what was going on in these waters
to make them so dangerous,
so they plotted the locations
of all the accidents on a chart
and when they laid this over
an infrared image of the ocean
they noticed a very striking pattern.
All the points lay along the same
strong ocean current,
the Agulhas current.
These crosses that we plotted
on all the accidents that occurred off
the South African coast
they're all located in this red band
and this band signifies the Agulhas current
which is a major current
flowing down the South African coast
that originates in the Indian Ocean
so it's warmer water and therefore
visible on this infrared image.
The Agulhas current is
a huge ocean current of warm water
streaming down from the north.
On its own
it shouldn't cause freak waves,
but scientists suspected
that if the current heading one way
were to meet wind
and waves coming in the opposite direction
then perhaps this could be the source
of all the trouble.
Down here in the south
is the area where all our waves
and storms are generated,
deep in the southern ocean
and they propagate
in a north-easterly direction up like this
and this is the area
then where the Agulhas current
coming from the north-east
meet up with these wave
and swell conditions coming from,
from this area down here,
so this is the area,
the danger area in terms of
these two significant phenomena.
But it was only when Grundlingh
got access to a new type of satellite,
one using radar,
that he could actually measure
the height of waves in the current
and it was just as Grundlingh had thought.
When the waves were going with
the current they were small,
but when the waves were going
in the opposite direction to the current
the effect was dramatic.
What we have here
is a plot of the wave height.
Outside the current
and the wave height inside the current
and what is quite conspicuous
here is this very,
very significant increase in the wave height
as the satellite moved across the current.
When the waves had to fight the current
they grew massive.
The current pushed against them
driving them so high and steep
a monster would rear up.
Here it seemed was a simple explanation
for the mythical freak.
These things are not really
what used to be called freak waves.
They, they're not of a freakish nature,
but they're quite common.
They will occur every time
that there are
waves moving against the current
and that happens very, very often.
This simple explanation
was a godsend for the shipping industry.
It meant that huge waves
were easy to avoid.
Just steer around the Agulhas current.
There was no need to spend huge sums
redesigning the world's fleet
and when scientists
looked at other places where freak waves
were most often reported
like Norway,
straightforward local conditions were again
found to be the cause.
Ships were simply ordered
to follow a different route
and avoid the danger areas.
There was now no need to question
science's understanding of the sea
and it seemed that the freak wave mystery
had been solved
but then something happened last year
in the South Atlantic
that no-one could explain away
and which would shatter
all the simple explanations.
In February 2001
the Caledonian Star spent several weeks
cruising around the Antarctic.
On board were 105 British
and American tourists
enjoying the wonders
of the southern ocean.
The Caledonian Star is a strong
as almost any ship in the world,
specially built to cope with the ice
and harsh conditions,
so when they received
a bad weather report for the journey home
no-one on board was worried.
We had a weather forecast predicting
gale force winds.
It's a very common weather report.
The ship is expected to face
that sort of weather all the time.
That didn't bother us at all.
The storm worsened till the waves
were over 12 metres high.
The ship rode these easily
and still no-one was concerned
until 5.30pm on 2 March
when the First Officer
saw something unexpected.
Out of nowhere I saw
in the distance about a mile away
a wave that appeared
to be twice the height of the
average wave height.
We estimate the height of the wave 30m
which is extremely high.
It was just like a mountain,
a wall of water coming against us
and it came from a different direction
like 30¡Æ on the starboard bow.
As the wall of water approached
they saw a huge trough
open up before it.
The ship probably went down
at an angle like this
and more or less
like a free-fall because the waves
were moving very fast
and when the ship
is tipping she fell like this
and talking to the other people
on board the ship
they were all falling
against the bulkheads
in the forward part of the section
wherever they were,
so she went like this
directly hitting a wave
and just buried
the bow into the wave.
The helmsman he was standing here
and he actually took cover
and when he looked down
he could not see the crest of the wave.
You had a wall of water ahead of you
and the ship was just running
into that wall.
The whole bridge was like an explosion
and I was washed
like I was blown away by water jet
over to the other side,
me and the helmsman
we were lying on top of each other
underwater fighting
books and cushions and shorts
and I had to swim,
actually I had to swim and,
and crawl to get back to the controls
to be able to put the ship back on,
on course.
The effect of the wave was devastating
shattering the ship's instrumentation.
The ship was effectively blind.
We lost our radars, the gyro compasses,
the echo sounders, the sonar,
parts of the radio communication.
It was a very humbling experience.
Of course it went through
your mind that this,
this might be it,
we might not make it.
But the Caledonian Star was lucky.
Her engines were still working.
The crew boarded up the windows
and eventually the ship limped back to port
but another ship out at sea
at that time was less fortunate.
The Bremen was a German cruise liner.
Again she was built to withstand anything
the South Atlantic could throw at her.
On board were 137 tourists.
They too were hit by a giant 30m wave
which devastated the bridge.
The bridge wasn't operable.
All the nautical tools, instruments,
the whole electronics failed immediately
with the break-in of seawater.
Everything including radar equipment,
weather faxes, ventilator, alarms,
everything malfunctioned.
All the instruments short-circuited,
the steering gear failed completely.
The ship was in distress,
not manoeuvrable,
but unlike the Caledonian Star
the Bremen also lost her engines.
The ship and all on board
were now in desperate trouble.
Unable to power her way through the sea
the ship drifted side on to the waves
exposing her weakest parts.
When the engine failed the ship
lay transversely to the sea
and the sea rolled crossways
to the ship against the big windows
of the restaurant.
This was the worst situation possible.
The restaurant windows are extremely weak.
If they were hit by any large wave
water would flood in and the ship would sink.
We would have capsized.
It would have broken through
or smashed the windows.
It was now a race against time.
To turn the ship
away from the waves they desperately
needed to restart the engine,
but the starter generator
was in pieces on the floor.
If they couldn't start the engine
the ship and everyone on her
was doomed.
We came from the Antarctic
and had nearly zero degree
water temperature
and the air temperature was the same.
In those high sea conditions
it wouldn't have been possible
to put lifeboats of life jackets
or life rafts in the water.
As well as that,
the passengers we sail with aren't
the youngest anymore.
I doubt any of us would have survived.
So in dark, rolling seas
they set to repairing the engine.
All the time the waves
were smashing against the windows
and then they got lucky.
The engine finally started.
Then for the first time
I had hope we would make it.
There are wonderful moments
when you know everything works
normally again.
Both the Caledonian Star
and the Bremen were fortunate to survive,
but their experiences challenged
everything known about freak waves.
There are no currents
or local conditions to cause rogue waves
in the South Atlantic.
According to traditional theory
such waves should be incredibly rare,
yet here were two
within days of each other,
so what was going on?
Science mobilised every technology
to solve the mystery.
Using a new radar satellite
Suzanne Lehner
of the German Aerospace Centre
began searching for freak waves
around the globe.
Now with these radar images
you can really see the individual waves.
You can see wave lengths,
wave directions, wave grouping.
The European remote sensing satellite
travels across the ocean
using highly sensitive radar
to get a detailed picture of the sea's surface.
It can pick out individual rogue waves
from anywhere in the world.
What we get is an image like this one.
This is actually the radar image
with the highest wave
we found on all of our
30,000 images we analysed.
This is a 30m wave here.
The high crest
followed by very low trough.
This is exactly the size of wave
which hit the Bremen
and the Caledonian Star,
the sort of wave
that science said was practically impossible
and in just three weeks' worth of data
they found over 10 such huge waves
out in the deep ocean.
What you can see here
is this highest wave
we found of about 30m -
that is colour-coded in red.
The next highest waves here
are about 27m high waves colour-
coded in orange.
We find another high wave here
in the North Pacific.
This is again kind of 26m high wave here.
We did not expect to find
in this limited amount of time
so many of these extreme wave events.
If the satellite data is right
it looks as if freak waves occur
in the deep ocean
far more frequently
than the traditional Linear Model
would predict.
The question is: why?
The answer seems to lie
in a completely different branch of science.
Al Osborne inhabits
a strange mathematical world
where almost anything can happen.
It's the bizarre non-linear world
of quantum physics.
In this world objects appear and disappear
according to one remarkable equation,
the Schrodinger equation.
The Schrodinger equation,
quantum mechanics,
we have TV programmes called
Quantum Leap
and so on and so forth
so we all think we know something
about that equation.
There's a version, however, modified,
that describes deep water waves.
Osborne is one of the world's
leading wave mathematicians.
For 30 years he has been obsessed
with the theoretical wave
described by the Schrodinger equation.
The equation describes
a theoretical water surface
where huge waves can suddenly leap up
out of nowhere,
where for some reason
normal waves become unstable
and grow huge.
The physics of the non-linear
Schrodinger equation
we can see in this simple example.
In the beginning it doesn't seen
like there's anything happening
and we could all just give up
and go drink a beer if we wanted.
On the other hand
we could keep moving forward
and maybe something will happen.
What we'll see is this central wave
here's going to start to grow.
It's growing because
it's robbing energy from its two,
two nearest neighbours
so here it's starting to come up,
you see it's growing,
it's stealing energy from
the nearest neighbours
and these waves are starting to drop.
See how this is coming down here.
Look at that decrease
and now in its full glory
it's a very large wave,
it has two smaller waves on each side
and two rather deep holes in the sea
around the peak.
In Osborne's theoretical world
these non-linear waves
could grow into monsters,
but the idea of waves becoming
unstable like this in the real world
was so outlandish that oceanographers said
it could never happen.
If you talk to people
who know something about ocean waves
nobody was going to take
this theory seriously.
Until someone sent him
the profile of a wave.
It was the one
that hit the Draupner oil rig in 1995,
the New Year wave.
For me it changed everything,
really changed everything.
The New Year wave looked identical
to one of his theoretical
non-linear waves.
I was flabbergasted,
absolutely flabbergasted.
It just looked exactly
like one of these exotic solutions
to the non-linear Schrodinger equation.
One of the ones
that we threw away
over the last 30 years
because we said
this kind of thing can't happen,
this kind of thing is just too strange
yet it just sits there and it looks at you
and you have to entertain
the possibility that it is a real effect
and it might really have something to do
with these extreme waves in the ocean.
If Osborne is right,
here is the reason why rogue waves
occur in the deep ocean.
It isn't to do with strange local conditions.
It's because waves start to behave
in a bizarre non-linear fashion.
For some reason they become unstable
and start sucking up energy
from waves around them.
You have what's called a rogue sea.
Now mariners have known about this.
You look at the sea state in one moment
everything just looks random
boring waves that we've known
about for a long time,
but then one of these waves
will come up,
they're all there they're all hiding away,
one of 'em will come up,
then a little later another will come up,
but in-between
you won't see them necessarily.
Osborne's theory means
that there are two types of wave -
the ordinary, stable linear wave
and an unstable non-linear monster,
a wave that at any point
can turn into a rogue.
This says that there are really
two kinds of waves.
Amazing thing.
Not the old boring sine waves
that we've known about for two centuries,
not only those,
but there's another kind of wave.
It's a really special beast.
It hides below the background waves
and then comes up
every once in a while.
This could then explain
what Wolfram saw in the North Sea.
It could explain
what caused the wave
that hit the Bremen
and the Caledonian Star
and it could explain
what caused the large number of waves
observed by satellite.
It seems that there is a separate
population of waves out in the ocean
that are higher and more frequent
than anyone had thought possible
and there's something that makes
these waves especially deadly
It's not just their size,
it's their shape.
The Linear Model
used by the shipping industry
has always assumed that waves
are smooth and gently sloping
so ships are only designed to cope with
undulating waves like these,
but according to mariners
freak waves are very different.
It was a vertical wall,
it wasn't a sloping wave,
it was a vertical wall
of solid green water.
I likened it to the white cliffs of Dover.
It just looked as though
there was this enormous great cliff
ahead of us.
Freak waves aren't the smooth,
undulating waves ships are designed for.
They are so steep
they can actually break.
It means they can hit a ship
with astonishing force.
The reason why rogue waves
are so damaging
is because they're breaking.
It's no longer really a wave.
It's just a pile of water coming flying
at you and it just goes bang.
Engineer Rod Rainey analyses
ship damage for the marine industry.
He has been calculating the huge forces
that these giant breaking waves
have on ships compared to normal waves.
This ball here
represents the force of a three metre
classical linear wave hitting a ship.
That's a force of about
1.5 tons per square metre.
This represents a typical storm wave
say 12m high hitting a ship -
about 6t/m©÷ .....
and this represents a force
from a rogue wave,
that's about 100 t/m©÷.
This force is far greater than most ships
are designed to withstand.
We've looked very carefully
at ships that have been damaged
by breaking waves
and we are sure that
the pressures that you can get
over substantial areas
are about 100 t/m©÷.
Now that compares with what
a ship is normally designed for
high up on the side
which typically about 15.
Now just to be clear here 15 t/m©÷
is what it can take without
any damage at all.
It can take perhaps double that
if you allow,
if you allow it to dent,
but it can't take 100 t/m©÷.
That will hole it.
It seems that rogue waves
are not only out there,
but they are far more powerful
than any ship can handle.
All the scientific evidence suggests
that the old explanation
for why the shipping industry
loses a ship a week may be inadequate.
It may not be just corrosion or pilot error.
Some at least must be due to freak waves.
It means that at last
we can lay to rest some of those mysterious
disappearances at sea,
like that of the Munchen.
As the storm grew on
that fateful night in December 1978
the Munchen would have carried confidently on
carving through the rising seas,
until suddenly out of the darkness
there would have loomed
a huge 30 metre wall of water.
The way it most probably goes is
that the bow of the vessel
is diving into a trough,
a wave trough and then before it
it has raised up again the wave
is so to say collapsing
over the bow and the superstructure
and with tremendous force
is striking against the front bulkhead
hitting the starboard lifeboat
and doing the damage
which we have seen on the picture.
The wave would have smashed
into the bridge
just like it did in the Bremen
taking out the instruments and engines
and rendering the ship helpless.
If the ship had turned side on to the waves
another wave could have holed her.
Water would have poured in
eventually plunging the great ship Munchen
and everyone on her
to the bottom of the sea.
Edited and Sync. by haN25771
terrorising the world's shipping.
Out of the darkness
came this great wall of water.
I have never seen a wave
as big as this in my whole life.
It can strike out of the blue
with devastating consequences.
You hit solid water
and it is like running into a brick wall.
The entire bridge was wrecked.
Horrific, monstrous.
You feel as if
the end of the world has come.
This is the story of a wave
that is sinking ships around the world,
a killer that defies all scientific understanding
and that no ship is designed to withstand.
It is one of the best kept
secrets of the sea,
that once a week a ship sinks
to the bottom of the ocean,
often without Mayday or any clue
as to what happened.
One of the most mysterious of these
disappearances is that of the Munchen.
The Munchen was a vast
new type of cargo ship,
the length of 2¨ö football pitches
she was the pride of
the German merchant navy.
On 7 December 1978
she set sail on a routine trip to America.
On board were 27 crew,
including Uwe Hinrichs.
This was my son Uwe,
20 years old.
He liked going to sea.
He said it was the safest ship
in the world.
Everybody said it was unsinkable,
the best ship in the world.
That night in December
there was a giant storm
raging across the Atlantic.
The waves were the size of houses,
but that would not have troubled
the Munchen.
For a ship so powerful and well maintained
such storms were just routine.
It was assumed that all was well
and going to schedule,
until 3 AM
on the night of 12 December.
It was an SOS from the Munchen.
She was in trouble and needed help,
but at this stag no-one
was too alarmed
because even if damaged
the powerful Munchen could float for days.
At the beginning we were very calm.
I told myself this
couldn't happen to the Munchen.
It's so safe.
Everything had been taken care of.
They'd thought about everything.
Within hours search and rescue planes
were sent to find her
and all the ships in the busy shipping route
came to join in the search.
Like a police hunt,
they were lined up three miles apart
combing vast areas of the ocean
for the Munchen.
It was the biggest search
in the history of shipping.
In charge was Captain Pieter de Nijs.
We hoped to find the ship,
or at least people or a lifeboat,
a life raft with people and we never found
any living soul
which every day became
more disappointing.
All that was recovered
was an empty lifeboat and some wreckage.
That a ship can be in trouble
that can happen to any ship.
It happens all the time
everywhere now and then,
but that it completely disappeared,
that such a big modern ship
could disappear
that was surprising.
For some reason the great ship
and her crew had disappeared
off the face of the earth
and no-one could understand why.
An investigation started immediately,
going over every detail of her design
and the few remains that had been found.
The only clue to what happened
was found on the recovered lifeboat.
Normally it hung 20 metres
above the waterline
and it was one of the tiny metal pins
that it hung from
that drew the investigators' attention.
One of them was Werner Hummel.
The key actually to what,
what could have happened to the Munchen
is the forward block
of the starboard lifeboat.
The, which is shown here on, on this picture.
We see here on the pictures these steel pins,
pins bent from forward to aft.
This indicates
that the boat hanging underneath
was struck by a tremendous force
forward aft
which caused these bendings
of these rather strong steel pins.
Some huge force had hurled the lifeboat
out of its metal pins
20m up above sea-level,
but what this force was
was a mystery.
The Maritime Court could only conclude
that bad weather caused an unusual event
which led to the sinking of the ship
but many mariners suspected
they knew what sunk the Munchen,
something that according to legend
sinks a huge number of ships every year:
a freak wave.
The freak, or rogue, wave
is one of the great myths of the sea.
All my sea career I've been
hearing stories about rogue waves.
Mariners talk of a single breaking wave
the size of a tower block
that can rear up out of nowhere.
It was colossal.
At least 80ft high,
probably even bigger.
We estimate the height of the wave
30 metres.
It looked enormous,
it looked like a white cliff.
It was just like a mountain,
a wall of water coming against us.
I've never seen a wave
as big as this in my whole life.
It's not a tsunami or tidal wave,
it's not caused by earthquakes
or giant landslides.
No-one knows where it comes from
or why it happens.
The freak wave is a huge,
steep wave coming out of the blue
without any prediction,
any expectations.
It's just there.
But there's one small problem
with all these stories.
According to all scientific knowledge
of the sea
freak waves are practically impossible.
Scientists have understood ocean waves
for centuries.
They are simply made by the wind.
The stronger the wind and the longer it blows
the bigger the waves.
In order to predict the biggest wave
a ship will meet
scientists use a set of mathematical equations
called the Linear Model.
This says that in any sea condition
there is a limit
to how big the largest wave will be
and that mariners tales of monster waves
that come out of nowhere
have got to be wrong.
Mariners are like fishermen aren't they.
I mean they,
sure they come back from the sea
and they tell all kinds of interesting stories
and people look at them suspiciously.
It's sort of like
you know the fish that got away
and he says oh that was 10 metres long,
you know.
Well waves are sort of the same.
Jim Gunson of the Met Office
uses the Linear Model to explain
why freak waves shouldn't exist.
Using the Linear Model
for a given sea state
this bell-shaped graph gives
the probability of a certain wave height
and it's like the inner population
of children in a class.
There is an average height of the children
and most children are around that height.
Some are quite a bit taller or shorter,
but there's, the chance that a child is,
is three or four times
the height of the average child
is very, very small.
So according to the Linear Model
even in a fierce storm
where average wave height may be 12 metres
the chance of meeting
a 30m wall of water
is practically zero.
Using the Linear Model for a 12m sea state
the chance of finding a 30m
trough to crest wave height
is 10 to the minus 5 which is 0.00001.
To put it in perspective the chan,
a wave like that would come along
using the Linear Model
once every 10,000 years.
The Linear Model is so well accepted
that the entire multi-billion pound
shipping industry relies on it.
Meteorologists use it to predict wave height
and naval architects to calculate ship's strength
and the biggest wave used in
ship design is just 15m.
The idea that there might be
freak waves out there
seemed impossible.
Instead any mysterious
disappearances at sea
have been blamed on far likely culprits,
like corrosion and human error,
but then one day something happened
that forced scientists
to look again
at their ideas about ocean waves.
On New Year's Day 1995
a storm was brewing in the North Sea.
The Draupner oil rig was 100 miles out
in the harshest of weather.
The sensors were regularly
reading waves of 12m
when suddenly out of the blue
came a wave that was so high and so steep
scientists had thought it was impossible.
For me it changed everything,
really changed everything.
This wave is at 26m.
It's so much bigger than
the background sea state.
When the New Year's Day wave came along
which fits this picture,
a 30m crest to trough height
in a 12m sea state,
alarm bells started going off
because of the very low probability
of this wave,
yet we saw it.
The sensors measured a wave so steep
and so high it should only occur once
in every 10,000 years.
Suddenly it seemed that the mariners
might be right after all.
The New Year wave shocked wave experts.
Among them Julian Wolfram.
He has spent years since then studying
the same part of the North Sea
looking for more freak waves.
What we need to do
is to study waves like this
because we need to know how frequently
they occur because if they occur quite frequently
they could actually pose a serious danger
to offshore structures and ships.
Wolfram was looking for any waves
that were bigger than the Linear Model
would predict
and to measure them
he installed a radar device
looking down to the sea's surface.
We have a device which faces down
to the surface of the sea
and basically sends out an electric pulse,
hits the surface of the water
and comes back again
and we time the amount of time
it takes to go down
and come back and from that
we can estimate the distance from
the radar to the wave
and we do that continuously
so we actually get the profile
of the surface.
Over four years
Wolfram measured every large wave
that hit the platform
and when he plotted the size
of these waves
compared to the height
of the waves around them
he found something completely unexpected.
The Linear Model predicts
that when you plot
the height of individual waves
relative to the waves either side
they should all lie on a straight line
and when the average size
of the waves were small
the Linear Model held true,
but he found 24 waves
that veered well above the line.
These biggest waves occurred
far more frequently
than the Linear Model predicted.
It appeared that these 24 waves
were a completely
different sort of beast.
One of the things we learn
when we plotted out the graph
was that in fact the really extreme waves
are different from
the slightly smaller waves.
They have different characteristics,
they tend to be significantly steeper,
they also tend to be higher than
we would normally expect
based on the ordinary theories
we've used up to date.
They're unusual,
they are freak waves.
It seemed Wolfram really had found
the rogue wave of mariners' myth.
For the shipping industry
Wolfram's research
could have been a disaster.
If there really were
freak waves out there
then potentially billions of dollars
were at risk.
It could mean having to redesign
every single ship.
With so much at stake
scientists needed to understand
what was going on.
Where did freak waves come from
and was there any way
of predicting them?
Searching for clues
they looked at where mariners
have reported seeing freak waves
and found one place
where they seemed to happen
over and over again - South Africa.
The southern cape of Africa
is a major shipping route
with millions of tons of cargo
being shifted every year.
The seas here may look calm
but for years they have been
notorious to sailors
for the ferocity of their waves.
Captain Dai Davies is one of the leading
salvage experts in South Africa.
He's seen the damage these waves
can cause dozens of times.
The Neptune Sapphire was a brand new vessel
on her maiden voyage.
It was as if a cutting torch had cut
the ship in half completely.
Atlas Pride happened in horrific weather.
This big wave just came out of nowhere,
hit the bow and destroyed the whole bow.
Mimosa was a very big vessel.
The ship's side plating was punched in,
completely smashed in
causing a hole to be formed
you could fit three double-decker
buses into.
When I went aboard the ship
to carry out the salvage
the Captain, who was
a very experienced Norwegian Master,
said it was the biggest wave
he'd ever seen in his life,
he'd ever seen.
Since 1990, 20 ships
have been devastated by rogue waves
off the coast of South Africa.
Scientists like Marten Grundlingh
decided to find out
what was going on in these waters
to make them so dangerous,
so they plotted the locations
of all the accidents on a chart
and when they laid this over
an infrared image of the ocean
they noticed a very striking pattern.
All the points lay along the same
strong ocean current,
the Agulhas current.
These crosses that we plotted
on all the accidents that occurred off
the South African coast
they're all located in this red band
and this band signifies the Agulhas current
which is a major current
flowing down the South African coast
that originates in the Indian Ocean
so it's warmer water and therefore
visible on this infrared image.
The Agulhas current is
a huge ocean current of warm water
streaming down from the north.
On its own
it shouldn't cause freak waves,
but scientists suspected
that if the current heading one way
were to meet wind
and waves coming in the opposite direction
then perhaps this could be the source
of all the trouble.
Down here in the south
is the area where all our waves
and storms are generated,
deep in the southern ocean
and they propagate
in a north-easterly direction up like this
and this is the area
then where the Agulhas current
coming from the north-east
meet up with these wave
and swell conditions coming from,
from this area down here,
so this is the area,
the danger area in terms of
these two significant phenomena.
But it was only when Grundlingh
got access to a new type of satellite,
one using radar,
that he could actually measure
the height of waves in the current
and it was just as Grundlingh had thought.
When the waves were going with
the current they were small,
but when the waves were going
in the opposite direction to the current
the effect was dramatic.
What we have here
is a plot of the wave height.
Outside the current
and the wave height inside the current
and what is quite conspicuous
here is this very,
very significant increase in the wave height
as the satellite moved across the current.
When the waves had to fight the current
they grew massive.
The current pushed against them
driving them so high and steep
a monster would rear up.
Here it seemed was a simple explanation
for the mythical freak.
These things are not really
what used to be called freak waves.
They, they're not of a freakish nature,
but they're quite common.
They will occur every time
that there are
waves moving against the current
and that happens very, very often.
This simple explanation
was a godsend for the shipping industry.
It meant that huge waves
were easy to avoid.
Just steer around the Agulhas current.
There was no need to spend huge sums
redesigning the world's fleet
and when scientists
looked at other places where freak waves
were most often reported
like Norway,
straightforward local conditions were again
found to be the cause.
Ships were simply ordered
to follow a different route
and avoid the danger areas.
There was now no need to question
science's understanding of the sea
and it seemed that the freak wave mystery
had been solved
but then something happened last year
in the South Atlantic
that no-one could explain away
and which would shatter
all the simple explanations.
In February 2001
the Caledonian Star spent several weeks
cruising around the Antarctic.
On board were 105 British
and American tourists
enjoying the wonders
of the southern ocean.
The Caledonian Star is a strong
as almost any ship in the world,
specially built to cope with the ice
and harsh conditions,
so when they received
a bad weather report for the journey home
no-one on board was worried.
We had a weather forecast predicting
gale force winds.
It's a very common weather report.
The ship is expected to face
that sort of weather all the time.
That didn't bother us at all.
The storm worsened till the waves
were over 12 metres high.
The ship rode these easily
and still no-one was concerned
until 5.30pm on 2 March
when the First Officer
saw something unexpected.
Out of nowhere I saw
in the distance about a mile away
a wave that appeared
to be twice the height of the
average wave height.
We estimate the height of the wave 30m
which is extremely high.
It was just like a mountain,
a wall of water coming against us
and it came from a different direction
like 30¡Æ on the starboard bow.
As the wall of water approached
they saw a huge trough
open up before it.
The ship probably went down
at an angle like this
and more or less
like a free-fall because the waves
were moving very fast
and when the ship
is tipping she fell like this
and talking to the other people
on board the ship
they were all falling
against the bulkheads
in the forward part of the section
wherever they were,
so she went like this
directly hitting a wave
and just buried
the bow into the wave.
The helmsman he was standing here
and he actually took cover
and when he looked down
he could not see the crest of the wave.
You had a wall of water ahead of you
and the ship was just running
into that wall.
The whole bridge was like an explosion
and I was washed
like I was blown away by water jet
over to the other side,
me and the helmsman
we were lying on top of each other
underwater fighting
books and cushions and shorts
and I had to swim,
actually I had to swim and,
and crawl to get back to the controls
to be able to put the ship back on,
on course.
The effect of the wave was devastating
shattering the ship's instrumentation.
The ship was effectively blind.
We lost our radars, the gyro compasses,
the echo sounders, the sonar,
parts of the radio communication.
It was a very humbling experience.
Of course it went through
your mind that this,
this might be it,
we might not make it.
But the Caledonian Star was lucky.
Her engines were still working.
The crew boarded up the windows
and eventually the ship limped back to port
but another ship out at sea
at that time was less fortunate.
The Bremen was a German cruise liner.
Again she was built to withstand anything
the South Atlantic could throw at her.
On board were 137 tourists.
They too were hit by a giant 30m wave
which devastated the bridge.
The bridge wasn't operable.
All the nautical tools, instruments,
the whole electronics failed immediately
with the break-in of seawater.
Everything including radar equipment,
weather faxes, ventilator, alarms,
everything malfunctioned.
All the instruments short-circuited,
the steering gear failed completely.
The ship was in distress,
not manoeuvrable,
but unlike the Caledonian Star
the Bremen also lost her engines.
The ship and all on board
were now in desperate trouble.
Unable to power her way through the sea
the ship drifted side on to the waves
exposing her weakest parts.
When the engine failed the ship
lay transversely to the sea
and the sea rolled crossways
to the ship against the big windows
of the restaurant.
This was the worst situation possible.
The restaurant windows are extremely weak.
If they were hit by any large wave
water would flood in and the ship would sink.
We would have capsized.
It would have broken through
or smashed the windows.
It was now a race against time.
To turn the ship
away from the waves they desperately
needed to restart the engine,
but the starter generator
was in pieces on the floor.
If they couldn't start the engine
the ship and everyone on her
was doomed.
We came from the Antarctic
and had nearly zero degree
water temperature
and the air temperature was the same.
In those high sea conditions
it wouldn't have been possible
to put lifeboats of life jackets
or life rafts in the water.
As well as that,
the passengers we sail with aren't
the youngest anymore.
I doubt any of us would have survived.
So in dark, rolling seas
they set to repairing the engine.
All the time the waves
were smashing against the windows
and then they got lucky.
The engine finally started.
Then for the first time
I had hope we would make it.
There are wonderful moments
when you know everything works
normally again.
Both the Caledonian Star
and the Bremen were fortunate to survive,
but their experiences challenged
everything known about freak waves.
There are no currents
or local conditions to cause rogue waves
in the South Atlantic.
According to traditional theory
such waves should be incredibly rare,
yet here were two
within days of each other,
so what was going on?
Science mobilised every technology
to solve the mystery.
Using a new radar satellite
Suzanne Lehner
of the German Aerospace Centre
began searching for freak waves
around the globe.
Now with these radar images
you can really see the individual waves.
You can see wave lengths,
wave directions, wave grouping.
The European remote sensing satellite
travels across the ocean
using highly sensitive radar
to get a detailed picture of the sea's surface.
It can pick out individual rogue waves
from anywhere in the world.
What we get is an image like this one.
This is actually the radar image
with the highest wave
we found on all of our
30,000 images we analysed.
This is a 30m wave here.
The high crest
followed by very low trough.
This is exactly the size of wave
which hit the Bremen
and the Caledonian Star,
the sort of wave
that science said was practically impossible
and in just three weeks' worth of data
they found over 10 such huge waves
out in the deep ocean.
What you can see here
is this highest wave
we found of about 30m -
that is colour-coded in red.
The next highest waves here
are about 27m high waves colour-
coded in orange.
We find another high wave here
in the North Pacific.
This is again kind of 26m high wave here.
We did not expect to find
in this limited amount of time
so many of these extreme wave events.
If the satellite data is right
it looks as if freak waves occur
in the deep ocean
far more frequently
than the traditional Linear Model
would predict.
The question is: why?
The answer seems to lie
in a completely different branch of science.
Al Osborne inhabits
a strange mathematical world
where almost anything can happen.
It's the bizarre non-linear world
of quantum physics.
In this world objects appear and disappear
according to one remarkable equation,
the Schrodinger equation.
The Schrodinger equation,
quantum mechanics,
we have TV programmes called
Quantum Leap
and so on and so forth
so we all think we know something
about that equation.
There's a version, however, modified,
that describes deep water waves.
Osborne is one of the world's
leading wave mathematicians.
For 30 years he has been obsessed
with the theoretical wave
described by the Schrodinger equation.
The equation describes
a theoretical water surface
where huge waves can suddenly leap up
out of nowhere,
where for some reason
normal waves become unstable
and grow huge.
The physics of the non-linear
Schrodinger equation
we can see in this simple example.
In the beginning it doesn't seen
like there's anything happening
and we could all just give up
and go drink a beer if we wanted.
On the other hand
we could keep moving forward
and maybe something will happen.
What we'll see is this central wave
here's going to start to grow.
It's growing because
it's robbing energy from its two,
two nearest neighbours
so here it's starting to come up,
you see it's growing,
it's stealing energy from
the nearest neighbours
and these waves are starting to drop.
See how this is coming down here.
Look at that decrease
and now in its full glory
it's a very large wave,
it has two smaller waves on each side
and two rather deep holes in the sea
around the peak.
In Osborne's theoretical world
these non-linear waves
could grow into monsters,
but the idea of waves becoming
unstable like this in the real world
was so outlandish that oceanographers said
it could never happen.
If you talk to people
who know something about ocean waves
nobody was going to take
this theory seriously.
Until someone sent him
the profile of a wave.
It was the one
that hit the Draupner oil rig in 1995,
the New Year wave.
For me it changed everything,
really changed everything.
The New Year wave looked identical
to one of his theoretical
non-linear waves.
I was flabbergasted,
absolutely flabbergasted.
It just looked exactly
like one of these exotic solutions
to the non-linear Schrodinger equation.
One of the ones
that we threw away
over the last 30 years
because we said
this kind of thing can't happen,
this kind of thing is just too strange
yet it just sits there and it looks at you
and you have to entertain
the possibility that it is a real effect
and it might really have something to do
with these extreme waves in the ocean.
If Osborne is right,
here is the reason why rogue waves
occur in the deep ocean.
It isn't to do with strange local conditions.
It's because waves start to behave
in a bizarre non-linear fashion.
For some reason they become unstable
and start sucking up energy
from waves around them.
You have what's called a rogue sea.
Now mariners have known about this.
You look at the sea state in one moment
everything just looks random
boring waves that we've known
about for a long time,
but then one of these waves
will come up,
they're all there they're all hiding away,
one of 'em will come up,
then a little later another will come up,
but in-between
you won't see them necessarily.
Osborne's theory means
that there are two types of wave -
the ordinary, stable linear wave
and an unstable non-linear monster,
a wave that at any point
can turn into a rogue.
This says that there are really
two kinds of waves.
Amazing thing.
Not the old boring sine waves
that we've known about for two centuries,
not only those,
but there's another kind of wave.
It's a really special beast.
It hides below the background waves
and then comes up
every once in a while.
This could then explain
what Wolfram saw in the North Sea.
It could explain
what caused the wave
that hit the Bremen
and the Caledonian Star
and it could explain
what caused the large number of waves
observed by satellite.
It seems that there is a separate
population of waves out in the ocean
that are higher and more frequent
than anyone had thought possible
and there's something that makes
these waves especially deadly
It's not just their size,
it's their shape.
The Linear Model
used by the shipping industry
has always assumed that waves
are smooth and gently sloping
so ships are only designed to cope with
undulating waves like these,
but according to mariners
freak waves are very different.
It was a vertical wall,
it wasn't a sloping wave,
it was a vertical wall
of solid green water.
I likened it to the white cliffs of Dover.
It just looked as though
there was this enormous great cliff
ahead of us.
Freak waves aren't the smooth,
undulating waves ships are designed for.
They are so steep
they can actually break.
It means they can hit a ship
with astonishing force.
The reason why rogue waves
are so damaging
is because they're breaking.
It's no longer really a wave.
It's just a pile of water coming flying
at you and it just goes bang.
Engineer Rod Rainey analyses
ship damage for the marine industry.
He has been calculating the huge forces
that these giant breaking waves
have on ships compared to normal waves.
This ball here
represents the force of a three metre
classical linear wave hitting a ship.
That's a force of about
1.5 tons per square metre.
This represents a typical storm wave
say 12m high hitting a ship -
about 6t/m©÷ .....
and this represents a force
from a rogue wave,
that's about 100 t/m©÷.
This force is far greater than most ships
are designed to withstand.
We've looked very carefully
at ships that have been damaged
by breaking waves
and we are sure that
the pressures that you can get
over substantial areas
are about 100 t/m©÷.
Now that compares with what
a ship is normally designed for
high up on the side
which typically about 15.
Now just to be clear here 15 t/m©÷
is what it can take without
any damage at all.
It can take perhaps double that
if you allow,
if you allow it to dent,
but it can't take 100 t/m©÷.
That will hole it.
It seems that rogue waves
are not only out there,
but they are far more powerful
than any ship can handle.
All the scientific evidence suggests
that the old explanation
for why the shipping industry
loses a ship a week may be inadequate.
It may not be just corrosion or pilot error.
Some at least must be due to freak waves.
It means that at last
we can lay to rest some of those mysterious
disappearances at sea,
like that of the Munchen.
As the storm grew on
that fateful night in December 1978
the Munchen would have carried confidently on
carving through the rising seas,
until suddenly out of the darkness
there would have loomed
a huge 30 metre wall of water.
The way it most probably goes is
that the bow of the vessel
is diving into a trough,
a wave trough and then before it
it has raised up again the wave
is so to say collapsing
over the bow and the superstructure
and with tremendous force
is striking against the front bulkhead
hitting the starboard lifeboat
and doing the damage
which we have seen on the picture.
The wave would have smashed
into the bridge
just like it did in the Bremen
taking out the instruments and engines
and rendering the ship helpless.
If the ship had turned side on to the waves
another wave could have holed her.
Water would have poured in
eventually plunging the great ship Munchen
and everyone on her
to the bottom of the sea.
Edited and Sync. by haN25771