Rogue Wave
It is the stuff of legends and lore dating back through all of recorded history, of sinking ships and sea monsters, of tall tales and tragic deaths. The problem was obvious; any credible witness to a rogue wave usually didn’t survive the rogue wave, thereby relegating the actual phenomenon to the looney tunes category by the so-called ‘experts’.
In an authoritarian culture only the authorities can declare something ‘real’ regardless of how much evidence has been previously offered. It took an actual ‘scientific’ measurement in the North Sea off Norway on New Year’s Day, 1995 aboard the Draupner platform to convince the scientists (aka the authorities) there really was such a thing as a rogue wave.
The charted output of that instrumented event, described as the Draupner wave, is seen below and clearly indicates an extreme aberration, a bolt of lightning out of the blue if you will, a single wave easily twice the average height of the largest waves and three to four times the average height of the smallest.
Measured from the trough to crest, the Draupner Wave was nearly 25 meters/84 feet tall.
Since the impact force of a wave is an exponential function of its height, you can clearly understand why no modern ship is designed to survive a direct hit from a wave of this magnitude. 15 meter/49 foot waves from trough to crest is the current design standard, while the Draupner was nearly 25m/82ft tall, thus the reason for rarity of eye witnesses to these events. The only reason the measuring device, an on-board laser, survived to tell the tale was because it was secured to a gas pipeline platform anchored to the sea bottom and suspended above this monster wave.
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