Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua Clark. There's Charles Bryant, There's Jerome Rowland. All of us full first names only for this episode. That's right. I love calling Jerry Jerome. I don't know when that started, but it's one of my favorite nicknames. Jero Mina, yeah, Jairs called her Jairs a lot too, and just Jiff. Yeah. What I typically do for nicknames is take the last name and half it and add an s if it's workable, like Kristen Congers, Congs or Stricks. For Strickland, I just call him strick. Yeah. Strick is good too, but rolls Rowls doesn't really work. Chairs is good, and that's called the nickname show. Yeah. Man, When I was listening to um oh, I can't remember what episode it was. Wow, this is almost not worth mentioning anyway. We're being very silly. I guess that was currency. It was a very silly episode, like we just were not going to take it seriously. It didn't matter how much anybody wanted us to. Well, that's because we had a tank of laughing gas here. And oh that was that I got you, so, Chuck, I have a question for you. Have you ever been to see once on the Maximum Cruise. That's the first time I've ever been out to see like legite man. It's a weird sensation, huh. Like it is different than I especially when you can see, you know, how deep it is, like on the TVs or whatever, they'll tell you how deep you're you are at any time, and you just think like, oh my god, there's like three thousand feet of water beneath me and nothing around me. It is a little creepy, it is, But it's a neat sensation too, agreed. Um, well, I take it from the fact that you didn't mention it, because I would think that you have mentioned it unsolicitedly. You didn't encounter a rogue wave, No, I would have mentioned that. I would think that it was very calm seas of course, Um, I didn't even get sea sick. Oh yeah, I have to. I have to tell everybody this. So you may find these things called C bands? Did you use those? I took one, but I didn't need it. We wore them almost all the time, and I have to say, and I when I didn't have it on I could tell like, I don't feel so hot. Put it on, Like five minutes later, I was totally normal. It was amazing. Yeah, I didn't have any seasickness. That was the occasional like, uh, the boat would move a little and be like, how many drinks have I had? But then I would remember, Oh, I'm not in a hotel, I'm in a floating hotel. Plus I had a ton of drinks. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Yeah, No rogue waves though, no road waves for us either. Um, because they're rare. I don't know about that. They're pretty rare. I guess if you compare it to the normal number of waves. Yeah, they're rare, that's what you have to compare it to, right, But they're a lot less rare than than scientists thought they were even just a couple of decades ago. Yeah, that's true. So, um, when we say rogue waves, depending on where you live in the world, you might say, what is a rogue wave? All I've ever heard of is a freak wave, Or if you live in another part of the world, you might have heard them called killer waves. Or if you're a fan of the band rogue Wave me, you might just think it's music you could that's pleasing to your ear right, That's not what we're talking about this time. No, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Roadway they happened to listen. I love those guys. They have a great documentary on Actually their drummer almost died from a bad kidney and PBS to this really good documentary on Um you know how a like a guy in a small indie band gets a new kidney and affords a new kidney. It was really great. It's called My Ache and Kidney, And you know, I can't remember what it was all now so out a few years ago, but they're great. My left kidney Zach Rogue is the name of the lead guy that explains the band's name. Yeah, exactly, and I think it was his right kidney man, although it might be wrong. Oh so with Rogue waves, not the band, the actual wave. Um there it's I guess, just to define it very briefly, a road wave is a huge, colossal wave that is, in most definitions, twice the size of the next tallest wave in given area. That's like basically described as a wall of water, because if you're out in the open ocean like you, you're normally encountering swells, like the waves are rounded, so boat can just kind of float up and down on them, even if they are huge. Yeah. Well yeah, and you gotta know what you're doing, you know, in those kind of ways. You gotta drive into it, the steer into it the right way and all that stuff. Right, But if your ship's captain, you know what you're doing better. Um, the rogue wave, you're in trouble because it is again, it's like a wall of water, so it's much steeper, much flatter, and when it encounters a boat, it doesn't go under the boat. It goes over the boat, it breaks on top of it and contin some serious damage. Because these things are enormous. Yeah, And the key to being a rogue wave is right there in the name. It's rogue. It is, uh, it is even if there's a bad storm. It is not like the other waves you're encountering, and they come out of seemingly come out of nowhere. That which is why they've never been able to photograph or to chart them from beginning to end, because they you can't predict them. It's not like, well, there's a road wave coming. They just happen, and all of a sudden, you're like, oh crap, right, let me get this boat steered directly, and I hope it doesn't break my ship in half, right, And and like you qualified it that nobody has a photograph of it forming or a video of it forming, Like there are a few photos here there, And I think there's some documentary evidence from like, um, uh one of those Discovery shows. Yeah, there was one on Deadliest Catch, but I think they've never scientifically recorded like from beginning to end right exactly, so no one knows where where they come from, like you say. And there's some pretty cool theories, but um, I think you have to kind of differentiate them because people are saying at this point, well, dummies, um, underwater earthquakes cause rogue waves. Bam, it's done. That's right. Okay, what about glacial calving? You drop a huge piece of glacier into the water, creates a giant wave, rogue wave? All right? What about coastal landslides? Okay, what's the problem here? Well, those, my friend, thank you for playing along in our little silly game. Uh, those all can cause huge waves. And some people might say, well the rogue but Um, they're really not know they're rogan that there. Yeah, it's a huge wave that's much bigger than all the other waves around it. They're not rogue because we know where they came from exactly, we know who their parents are. Right with a rogue wave, Um, again, it just kind of comes out of nowhere. Like you said, it can be even in a storm. They're much bigger than the other huge waves. But they can also just be an enormous wave in totally calm seas, which makes them extremely mysterious. Yeah, and it depends on who you ask. There's no strict definition of how much larger it has to be. I've seen everything from thirty three to three times as big as the next highest waves, So there isn't, like, you know, a rank and file definition of how big it needs to be. But um, they've chartered some charted some big ones. Uh. In February of two thousand, this is what I found is the largest ever recorded wave by science. It was off the coast of Scotland, recorded at um. It was a British research vessel and that was using scientific instrumentation. But there are tons of anecdotal stories. In fact, the if you're a seaman then you are. You probably have one of your own or heard a million of them. Um. You know, sailors are renowned for their stories, but ruge waves really kind of like they they're the big bang stories. You know. Yeah, it's kind of um. You know a lot of people said, oh, there's such thing as navy's strength gin, so are you sure you know what you're talking about? But every once in a while, the ship would come limping back into port and you know, it's radar in Tenna would be snapped off even though it was like ninety ft above water, and they would say it was a wave, and the captain would be a known sober teetotaler who had no reason to lie. And um, they would say, okay, maybe there is such thing as rogue waves. But it wasn't until the first one was recorded scientifically. That's right. Uh, and you know what, let's talk about that right after this message, so chuck, like we said, um, rogue waves were considered sailors lower as far as science went, until on New Year's Day, off the coast of Norway, I believe there was an oil platform called the drop Ner platform, and it just happened to be recording waves that day, and it was recording waves that were about sixteen to twenty three ft high about five to seven ms, which I mean, like that's pretty respectable, fear surfer, you probably want to get it out on that, you know. But then all of a sudden one passed by, and just one that was sixty six ft tall, and it was out of nowhere, and there was nothing else that came after it, and there was nothing before it. And they figured out that they had just recorded the first rogue wave ever captured by science. It is pretty crazy, but this is kind of um coming after things like we said, like anecdotal evidence, like there was one from the Qiwi two. I believe the captain, Um, I'm not sure what year it was, but the captain described, all of a sudden, this rogue wave comes out, and he said it was it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the White White Cliffs of Dover, which has to be kind of scary. Yeah, I imagine. So. Uh. The Queen Elizabeth one as well, the RMS Queen Elizabeth more specifically was in World War Two, the Gray Ghost was converted to a to a military ship to carry troops basically and could carry up to sixteen thousand men um, which is staggering at thirty knots, which is very handy. But um, a rogue wave struck that ship near Greenland, Ino and supposedly shattered windows ninety feet above the waterline. But she survived because I saw cat Power play on that ship. That was the ship, huh, yeah, there was. It's been docked in Long Beach since the sixties. And UM I went to the Alt Tomorrow Parties festival there by the water and it was mainly like the big stage, but they had a second stage set up on the Queen Elizabeth, which is really neat and um I walked in and saw cap Power played for like twenty minutes before I went back out to the main stage. You know, um, the neat venue motor Head is has the cruise going on really coming soon, I think this month in September. Wow, that would be pretty awesome. That would be awesome. U. The QI though is, um you can stay it's like a hotel now, yeah, so you can stay there and eat there and see cat Power there. That's also haunted, I'm sure. Well her performance was haunting, so so there was a there there's all of these sailors coming back saying this way was crazy, and everybody saying, no, you're the one who's crazy. But then after that capture UM, and they're saying, okay, there is such thing as rogue waves. And then for some reason the nineties were like a huge boom for capturing rogue waves, improving that there was not only did they exist, there was a lot more of them than they used to think. I think people were trying more, just like recording the more. And then they said, okay, we've we understand that there is such thing as rogue waves, but we have no idea how they formed. And so they started really kind of looking into what causes a rogue wave. Yeah, and if you guys have listened to our surfing episode, UM, which is pretty good, that's all right. But we got into the physics of a wave. Uh, and the highlights of that are this. Uh. If you're looking at a wave, the crest, as you know, is is the highest portion. The trough is the lowest portion. It's the dip in the between the waves. You have the waves height, which is the distance between the trough and the crest. The distance between the crest themselves is the length of the wave, and then the wave period or wave speed is the amount of time between one crest and the next. And then what's the last one there? Wave energy. Yeah, that's the kinetic and potential energy carried by the wave. Yes, and that is sourced from someone named land I see in the No, it's not me. So so you've got what you've just described as a wave. Like, if you have all of this information, you can mathematically describe any kind of wave. And it's not just um ocean waves too. Like this applies to optics, it applies to microwaves, it applies to all like anything that takes the form of a wave. Apparently even the stock market behaves as a wave. And a lot of this stuff applies to It applies to you and your break dancing. That's the worm in there. A wave too, Yeah, there's a wave, but I do the worm, that's my signature move. Or if you're a sports stadium and you and you're one of those people that participates in the wave doing the wave. Yeah, actually yeah, I'm sure that this stuff would apply as well. Um, but under normal circumstances with just a normal wave or something, if you're out on the ocean. There are hundreds or thousands of waves all around you at any given point in sure um and they're brought about by the movement of wind across water. And if there's a lot of unobstructed water, which is called fetch, that's apparently the amount of ocean that's unobstructed that the wind can blow across. And the wind is blowing strongly and it's keeping up its breath, then you're gonna have some waves form, and that's what forms a wave. Yeah, and there's you know, there's other things that can impact it. Wind is the major thing, but you know, the depth of the water at the time, tides and currents, uh, if there's an island or something in the way, that's all going to affect it. But that big open fetches where you're gonna get your big, big waves, right, And that's a just a normal wave. What they think, what I should say one of the main theories for what causes a rogue wave, because just these normal circumstances don't account for a rogue wave. Right. You can point to any normal wave and be like, yeah, it's it's wind over this fetch and boom, there's your there's your seven ft ocean wave right with a roade wave. That doesn't necessarily apply. So they think one of the proposed theories is that road waves form when you have a current going one way and good sized wave going the other way, say from a storm. The current pushes up the wave and basically transfers when they run into each other, it transfers some energy so that the wave just gets freakishly large for a minute, and then all of a sudden, you've got your rogue wave. Yeah. So like if you have a really bad storm and in a thirty foot wave and it hits something like the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream might pick it up and say I'm gonna make you larger. Yeah, because I'm the Gulf Stream, I'm gonna make you a stop. But they have definitely found more evidence of road waves in some of these currents, like the Gulf Stream on the east coast of the US or the one of the two that's a current on the southward east coast of Africa. They project with maths that you could get a wave of as big as a hundred ninetet um But I don't know, but they definitely have chartered um charted a lot more waves along those streams and uh and currents. And actually, if if it is true, if it does pan out that currents, strong currents with waves running opposite to them causes rogue waves, they're saying, well, then the Gulf stream would account for why the Bermuda Triangle has so many das disappearance disappearances. I don't know if we mentioned that, and I don't think we did. We did one on the Bermuda Triangle that I'm sure we said, like like they were just a wave that swallowed him, But I don't know if we may have said rogue waves. It didn't stick out to me as a thing until I ran across this article though. Plus that was like eighty years ago. It was a hundred years ago. There's another explanation to um and this is basically the foundation of a mathematical incipal called the Peregrine solaton like this one. So the Peregrine Solatan is named after a mathematician named Peregrine, and he in the eighties predicted rogue waves like he. He mathematically proved that they were possible and showed how they would form. Yes he Um, I can't remember his first name. Was so British, so before that it was just like stories, yes, and then this guy comes along and proves that that a road wave can occur, and he's also even more awesome. He's he it's not just again, it's not just limited to ocean waves. It's he's saying, you can have this in optics, which has been proven in the lab. You can have it on the ocean, which has been proven in the lab simulation. And basically the whole thing with the Peregrine Solatan is that you have a normal wave and if you add just a little bit of noise to these predictable um formations of a wave, you can have a freakishly large steep wave that comes and goes fairly quickly. And that's a Peregrine solitan And they they've since shown that these things can't exist. Um, but he predicted it in like the eighties, like a good ten years before a rogue wave was ever recorded scientifically. Uh, Professor Peregrine came up with it. They named the Falcon after him to probably right. Uh, Well, there's also the wave reinforcement. Well, this is their related is part of it. Yeah, So basically waves getting together and becoming one large wave. Yeah, so that noise that you add into the normal process in this case, the wave reinforcement that noise would come from other waves got you. So the idea is, if let's say you have a ten foot wave passing over a twenty ft wave, that's going to be a thirty ft wave. Yeah, that's so neat. Or it can go in the other direction, and I guess it just has depend depends on how they meet each other. You can also subtract it. Yeah, so like a trough, Yeah, that's between the crest than the lowest point of the wave. Right If if the trough is like ut and a twenty foot wave runs into that, it drops down and just becomes a five foot wave. Yeah. But even the basic addition and subtraction, which makes it really exciting to me because I understand that kind of thing, not me. Addition and subtraction very basic if I have a calculator. But but they're they're saying like, if you have say five waves or ten waves, that five ft high, and the five ft high is the normal average in the area. But they all just happened to get together at this right point, they're going to turn into a fifty ft wave, a single fifty ft wave, and all of a sudden you have a rogue wave that just kind of comes out of nowhere. Or if you're in a bad storm, um, just a couple of large waves can form something pretty intimidating very fast. So we'll talk about how common these things might be coming up after the Alright, so, uh, they used to think they weren't so common. And like we said earlier, just the lore of of the sailor Navy strength gin exactly what is navy string? Is that just like a higher proof Oh my goodness, is it good? It's too much to jinny, It's no, it just it destroys you. It's not good for you. I've never thought the high high proof alcohols like to me. Adding the extra just takes away from the flavor a little bit for me. You know, like that crazy rum that's like navy strength throw them. Yeah, I guess so it is. It's like firewater. Yeah, it's navy strength through them and Navy strength strength gin. It used to be part of the British Sailors rations. There's there's only one reason to drink that stuff. But I mean it went away for a reason and then they brought it back and it's it's just crazy stuff crazy. They brought it back for college students. I mean there's I can't remember who makes it. I think Leopolds might make a navy strength gin. Yeah, it's it's rough and I love Leopolds Jim, but there's any navy strength gin I think would just be too much for me. Yeah, you get at older and you're not impressed by that stuff, you know, like when you're in college though, that's when you're like, this is five thousand proof. We're going to put it in some kool aid, and none of us are going to remember tonight. Nobody better be putting Leopold's gin in kool aid. I will find you look to your nearest college campus because it's probably happening. Uh So, Anyway, like we said, they used to think they were pretty rare. But um in two thousand four, the European Space Agency started collecting data from satellites and they basically want to see, like how often do these occur? Uh I've seen some different estimates, from three and ten thousand in the ocean to three and one thousand near coastal inlets and river mouths. Um, but I think what they found with their max wave project was ten waves eight two ft are higher. And that's from the s AS data, right, And that was over a period of three weeks. But the thing is is the previous weather data collection predicted that you get one every like fifty years, and all of a sudden, they saw ten in three weeks. So they're like, Okay, these things are way more common than we we thought. And like I said, they started to think, well, maybe this accounts for a lot of disappearances. Yeah. One thing they're gonna try and do with another program called wave Atlas is do surveys over a longer period of time, which um makes a lot of sense, of course, because that could have been a really rough three weeks. Yes, again it could have. It's like I was looking into shipping containers because the rogue wave caused to the worst shipping container losses in recent history. Uh huh? Or rogue waves did? I should say it wasn't just one, um, And I should say it's not necessarily just one. Apparently mathematically, it's also predicted that rogue waves tend to occur in threes for some reason, and I couldn't find out why. UM. But they're They're like, if you look at the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The account of that um from the captain of the Arthur Anderson, which is the ship that was going along with Lake uh Herea. I think when it wasn't Superior Um. They were out in a storm in November and the Arthur Anderson was hit by two thirty five foot waves, which is huge for the Great Lakes, and they lost sight of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the next thing they know, it's on the bottom of the Lake Superior broken into and they were like, well, clearly the rogue wave took it down. But there were two of them that night, and apparently there are plenty of accounts of not just one, but more than one rogue wave coming out of the Blue Well. And we got a great song out of it, Gordon Lightfoot, the Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. It's so odd that I guess that was just the time, but it seems weird that you get a big radio hit about a hip wreck that was when the AM stations dominated. Yeah, he's Canadian too, so that might explain a lot. I read a good article today on the lost art of the Fade out and songs. Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. Slight did a good article on it, and how you know, the biggest hits of the of the sixties and seventies and into the eighties even had those great fade outs you just you don't hear anymore. No. Well, one of the reasons why it's because it's so awkward to try to do that live. Like do you remember when Davy Jones guested on The Brady Bunch, Marcia was trying to get him to play the prom um He does the rendition of girl and then it fades out at the end while he's singing and he's like kind of singing like more softly. Well, that's because he's lived sinking to the recorded version, right, but I mean live, they would end them differently. Yeah, but he was supposedly in the studio and it's like fading as he's recording. It was just awkward to see and you could tell he felt uncomfortable. It's very awkward. Uh So, I think one of the last things we should cover is the differentiation between a rogue wave and a tsunami. We've done a podcast on tsunamis and the main differences is where it comes from and where it happens. Uh. Tsunami's aren't typically a ninety foot wall of water. A lot of times it's a five foot wall of water that just has such force and speed coming ashore that it does all kinds of damage. Well, yeah, depending on when where you see it. Because the rather than a wave like a normal wave, UM, where the energy is carried on top of the water because the wind whipped it up there, the tsunami is generated underwater, so the energy carries beneath the water. So when it hits that coast, all a sudden, it's pushed upward and you have a huge wall of water. But out in the ocean, you're like, look at how fast that three ft wave is traveling. Yeah, exactly, that's a tsunami. Plus again, we know what caused the tsunami, so it's not a rogue wave, and it's again not a huge towering wave on top of the water until it hits the coastline. That's right. Uh. And if your ship, um, you know, they can build you better and stronger to encounter harsher waves, but they're never gonna start building ships to withstand rogue waves because they're you know, they don't encounter them that often, and there's really nothing you can do if you come across a ninety ft wave, I mean the Empire State Building from the bottom to the you know kind of where the square part ends. It is a hundred and eleven feet. Can you imagine seeing a wave as tall as the Empire State Building. You can't build a ship that can withstand that. So basically, your your ballast is your stability, and they can build you as secure as possible, but there's really not much you can do top steer it as best you can and cross your fingers and pray. But also, you know, a greater understanding of how rogue waves come about, could you know, lead to improve safety less loss of life. Yeah. Maybe prediction I think is is the next wave if you will, like that's the only thing that's gonna be able to help is if you even a five minute heads up like this thing might be forming somewhere nearby, or sail around this area because that's a rogue wave city. Yeah, and no Opelio crab is worth it. You know. I saw this UM article they somebody did a study about shipping containers and UM the effect they have when they go overboard and apparently they provide nice little ecosystems when they hit the hit the bottom of the ocean, like they went and checked and they're like, okay, that's pretty great. Everything's just fine. They like the shipping containers down there, the artificial reefs right inadvertent ones. So that's it for rogue waves. If you want to learn more about it, you can type those two words into the search part how stuff works dot com. And since I said search part's time for the listener mail. I'm gonna call this help for my future. We've gotten a few of these where people ask for you know, like what should I do with my life? So I'm gonna read another one. First time email or longtime listener guys, I want to say your show has been with me through some very hard times. Your humor, friendship, and connection with your fans got me through the passing of my grandfather and a very hard breakup. So thanks for that. Uh. What I was hoping you could help me out with was this one more thing I feel lost with the path I am on in life. I'm a recent college grad from Western Washington. You with the bachelor's in history and a minor and web design. I'm now out in the working world, and I find it hard to decide what I want to do with my life. I've listened to past episodes where you answer fans who are written in, so I thought i'd give it a shot. Let it be clear, I am not a struggling college graduate. I've landed a steady, secure desk job, but after the first couple of months it's lost as luster and I feel myself becoming the stereotypical corporate drone. I'm impressed by the position you, too, have found yourself in. I want to know what advice you have for a young professional and scholar in this world. I need a career that has the potential to be fulfilling. More fulfilling than creating spreadsheets and TPS reports. That is from Kyle. TPS reports really exist, just like I think if people just use that phrase because they catch all from office space, but maybe it might be a real thing. That's Kyle. Yeah, Kyle, um. I thought about this a little bit. My advice to you is to not quit your job, but to do your soul searching on someone else's dime for a little while. If you've got a good job, you're way ahead of a lot of other people. So don't go quit in your job and saying, you know, I want to go open up a glamping operation in Colorado. Oh, it's the new thing with like high quality camping. Oh it's like the new butcher. Yes, sort of like a you know, you'll have a nice canvas tent in the woods with an actual bed and a rug and a lamp and a refrigerator and you charge people to go stay there. It sounds very nice. Yeah, it's not camping, it's lamping. But um, yeah, Kyle, So I would not suggest you, like go quit your job and run off and join the circus. How about that. That's easier, Kyle. I never have a heads up on stuff like this, so I never have any decent advice. But I definitely would side with Chuck on that one. Like if you if you got stability right now, that doesn't mean you're trapped. You're never trapped. Like, figure out what you want to do. Figure out what you can make decent money at that will make you happy. If it's not the job you're in, then there's your answer. Go figure out what that is, but do it in the context of your current job as well. It's almost across the board a bad idea to just quit your job and then figure out what you're going to do, Like that's not smart. Yeah, and these emails are sometimes stuff because Kyle, I can't decide what you like and what you joy. If you had written in and said, boy, I really love drawing cartoons or roller skating and long walks on the beach, right, but I am a corporate drone, then I would say, hey, maybe try and be a cartoonist. So you need to think about, sir, what you enjoy in life, of what inspires you. And there's probably a job scenario that fits that description. Yeah, and don't be discouraged about um having a history degree and not using it like that. It's becoming more and more prevalent to have a degree that you don't necessarily use. It just made you a more well rounded and interesting person and you learn the skills that you need to survive after college in college, no matter what your degree was. And you can always go to house stuff works dot com and look at the career s page. We actually have a career stage that is updated. And if they say there's jobs, there's jobs. Boom. Because I kind of feel like Kyle was asking a little bit for a job. Maybe well, thanks a lot, Kyle. We wish you the best to luck into everybody who finds himself or herself in a position similar to Cole's. We are crossing our fingers for you guys and sending you good vibes. Uh. And if you want to say hi to us in the interim, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can hang out with us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.

Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua Clark. There's Charles Bryant, There's Jerome Rowland. All of us full first names only for this episode. That's right. I love calling Jerry Jerome. I don't know when that started, but it's one of my favorite nicknames. Jero Mina, yeah, Jairs called her Jairs a lot too, and just Jiff. Yeah. What I typically do for nicknames is take the last name and half it and add an s if it's workable, like Kristen Congers, Congs or Stricks. For Strickland, I just call him strick. Yeah. Strick is good too, but rolls Rowls doesn't really work. Chairs is good, and that's called the nickname show. Yeah. Man, When I was listening to um oh, I can't remember what episode it was. Wow, this is almost not worth mentioning anyway. We're being very silly. I guess that was currency. It was a very silly episode, like we just were not going to take it seriously. It didn't matter how much anybody wanted us to. Well, that's because we had a tank of laughing gas here. And oh that was that I got you, so, Chuck, I have a question for you. Have you ever been to see once on the Maximum Cruise. That's the first time I've ever been out to see like legite man. It's a weird sensation, huh. Like it is different than I especially when you can see, you know, how deep it is, like on the TVs or whatever, they'll tell you how deep you're you are at any time, and you just think like, oh my god, there's like three thousand feet of water beneath me and nothing around me. It is a little creepy, it is, But it's a neat sensation too, agreed. Um, well, I take it from the fact that you didn't mention it, because I would think that you have mentioned it unsolicitedly. You didn't encounter a rogue wave, No, I would have mentioned that. I would think that it was very calm seas of course, Um, I didn't even get sea sick. Oh yeah, I have to. I have to tell everybody this. So you may find these things called C bands? Did you use those? I took one, but I didn't need it. We wore them almost all the time, and I have to say, and I when I didn't have it on I could tell like, I don't feel so hot. Put it on, Like five minutes later, I was totally normal. It was amazing. Yeah, I didn't have any seasickness. That was the occasional like, uh, the boat would move a little and be like, how many drinks have I had? But then I would remember, Oh, I'm not in a hotel, I'm in a floating hotel. Plus I had a ton of drinks. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Yeah, No rogue waves though, no road waves for us either. Um, because they're rare. I don't know about that. They're pretty rare. I guess if you compare it to the normal number of waves. Yeah, they're rare, that's what you have to compare it to, right, But they're a lot less rare than than scientists thought they were even just a couple of decades ago. Yeah, that's true. So, um, when we say rogue waves, depending on where you live in the world, you might say, what is a rogue wave? All I've ever heard of is a freak wave, Or if you live in another part of the world, you might have heard them called killer waves. Or if you're a fan of the band rogue Wave me, you might just think it's music you could that's pleasing to your ear right, That's not what we're talking about this time. No, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Roadway they happened to listen. I love those guys. They have a great documentary on Actually their drummer almost died from a bad kidney and PBS to this really good documentary on Um you know how a like a guy in a small indie band gets a new kidney and affords a new kidney. It was really great. It's called My Ache and Kidney, And you know, I can't remember what it was all now so out a few years ago, but they're great. My left kidney Zach Rogue is the name of the lead guy that explains the band's name. Yeah, exactly, and I think it was his right kidney man, although it might be wrong. Oh so with Rogue waves, not the band, the actual wave. Um there it's I guess, just to define it very briefly, a road wave is a huge, colossal wave that is, in most definitions, twice the size of the next tallest wave in given area. That's like basically described as a wall of water, because if you're out in the open ocean like you, you're normally encountering swells, like the waves are rounded, so boat can just kind of float up and down on them, even if they are huge. Yeah. Well yeah, and you gotta know what you're doing, you know, in those kind of ways. You gotta drive into it, the steer into it the right way and all that stuff. Right, But if your ship's captain, you know what you're doing better. Um, the rogue wave, you're in trouble because it is again, it's like a wall of water, so it's much steeper, much flatter, and when it encounters a boat, it doesn't go under the boat. It goes over the boat, it breaks on top of it and contin some serious damage. Because these things are enormous. Yeah, And the key to being a rogue wave is right there in the name. It's rogue. It is, uh, it is even if there's a bad storm. It is not like the other waves you're encountering, and they come out of seemingly come out of nowhere. That which is why they've never been able to photograph or to chart them from beginning to end, because they you can't predict them. It's not like, well, there's a road wave coming. They just happen, and all of a sudden, you're like, oh crap, right, let me get this boat steered directly, and I hope it doesn't break my ship in half, right, And and like you qualified it that nobody has a photograph of it forming or a video of it forming, Like there are a few photos here there, And I think there's some documentary evidence from like, um, uh one of those Discovery shows. Yeah, there was one on Deadliest Catch, but I think they've never scientifically recorded like from beginning to end right exactly, so no one knows where where they come from, like you say. And there's some pretty cool theories, but um, I think you have to kind of differentiate them because people are saying at this point, well, dummies, um, underwater earthquakes cause rogue waves. Bam, it's done. That's right. Okay, what about glacial calving? You drop a huge piece of glacier into the water, creates a giant wave, rogue wave? All right? What about coastal landslides? Okay, what's the problem here? Well, those, my friend, thank you for playing along in our little silly game. Uh, those all can cause huge waves. And some people might say, well the rogue but Um, they're really not know they're rogan that there. Yeah, it's a huge wave that's much bigger than all the other waves around it. They're not rogue because we know where they came from exactly, we know who their parents are. Right with a rogue wave, Um, again, it just kind of comes out of nowhere. Like you said, it can be even in a storm. They're much bigger than the other huge waves. But they can also just be an enormous wave in totally calm seas, which makes them extremely mysterious. Yeah, and it depends on who you ask. There's no strict definition of how much larger it has to be. I've seen everything from thirty three to three times as big as the next highest waves, So there isn't, like, you know, a rank and file definition of how big it needs to be. But um, they've chartered some charted some big ones. Uh. In February of two thousand, this is what I found is the largest ever recorded wave by science. It was off the coast of Scotland, recorded at um. It was a British research vessel and that was using scientific instrumentation. But there are tons of anecdotal stories. In fact, the if you're a seaman then you are. You probably have one of your own or heard a million of them. Um. You know, sailors are renowned for their stories, but ruge waves really kind of like they they're the big bang stories. You know. Yeah, it's kind of um. You know a lot of people said, oh, there's such thing as navy's strength gin, so are you sure you know what you're talking about? But every once in a while, the ship would come limping back into port and you know, it's radar in Tenna would be snapped off even though it was like ninety ft above water, and they would say it was a wave, and the captain would be a known sober teetotaler who had no reason to lie. And um, they would say, okay, maybe there is such thing as rogue waves. But it wasn't until the first one was recorded scientifically. That's right. Uh, and you know what, let's talk about that right after this message, so chuck, like we said, um, rogue waves were considered sailors lower as far as science went, until on New Year's Day, off the coast of Norway, I believe there was an oil platform called the drop Ner platform, and it just happened to be recording waves that day, and it was recording waves that were about sixteen to twenty three ft high about five to seven ms, which I mean, like that's pretty respectable, fear surfer, you probably want to get it out on that, you know. But then all of a sudden one passed by, and just one that was sixty six ft tall, and it was out of nowhere, and there was nothing else that came after it, and there was nothing before it. And they figured out that they had just recorded the first rogue wave ever captured by science. It is pretty crazy, but this is kind of um coming after things like we said, like anecdotal evidence, like there was one from the Qiwi two. I believe the captain, Um, I'm not sure what year it was, but the captain described, all of a sudden, this rogue wave comes out, and he said it was it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the White White Cliffs of Dover, which has to be kind of scary. Yeah, I imagine. So. Uh. The Queen Elizabeth one as well, the RMS Queen Elizabeth more specifically was in World War Two, the Gray Ghost was converted to a to a military ship to carry troops basically and could carry up to sixteen thousand men um, which is staggering at thirty knots, which is very handy. But um, a rogue wave struck that ship near Greenland, Ino and supposedly shattered windows ninety feet above the waterline. But she survived because I saw cat Power play on that ship. That was the ship, huh, yeah, there was. It's been docked in Long Beach since the sixties. And UM I went to the Alt Tomorrow Parties festival there by the water and it was mainly like the big stage, but they had a second stage set up on the Queen Elizabeth, which is really neat and um I walked in and saw cap Power played for like twenty minutes before I went back out to the main stage. You know, um, the neat venue motor Head is has the cruise going on really coming soon, I think this month in September. Wow, that would be pretty awesome. That would be awesome. U. The QI though is, um you can stay it's like a hotel now, yeah, so you can stay there and eat there and see cat Power there. That's also haunted, I'm sure. Well her performance was haunting, so so there was a there there's all of these sailors coming back saying this way was crazy, and everybody saying, no, you're the one who's crazy. But then after that capture UM, and they're saying, okay, there is such thing as rogue waves. And then for some reason the nineties were like a huge boom for capturing rogue waves, improving that there was not only did they exist, there was a lot more of them than they used to think. I think people were trying more, just like recording the more. And then they said, okay, we've we understand that there is such thing as rogue waves, but we have no idea how they formed. And so they started really kind of looking into what causes a rogue wave. Yeah, and if you guys have listened to our surfing episode, UM, which is pretty good, that's all right. But we got into the physics of a wave. Uh, and the highlights of that are this. Uh. If you're looking at a wave, the crest, as you know, is is the highest portion. The trough is the lowest portion. It's the dip in the between the waves. You have the waves height, which is the distance between the trough and the crest. The distance between the crest themselves is the length of the wave, and then the wave period or wave speed is the amount of time between one crest and the next. And then what's the last one there? Wave energy. Yeah, that's the kinetic and potential energy carried by the wave. Yes, and that is sourced from someone named land I see in the No, it's not me. So so you've got what you've just described as a wave. Like, if you have all of this information, you can mathematically describe any kind of wave. And it's not just um ocean waves too. Like this applies to optics, it applies to microwaves, it applies to all like anything that takes the form of a wave. Apparently even the stock market behaves as a wave. And a lot of this stuff applies to It applies to you and your break dancing. That's the worm in there. A wave too, Yeah, there's a wave, but I do the worm, that's my signature move. Or if you're a sports stadium and you and you're one of those people that participates in the wave doing the wave. Yeah, actually yeah, I'm sure that this stuff would apply as well. Um, but under normal circumstances with just a normal wave or something, if you're out on the ocean. There are hundreds or thousands of waves all around you at any given point in sure um and they're brought about by the movement of wind across water. And if there's a lot of unobstructed water, which is called fetch, that's apparently the amount of ocean that's unobstructed that the wind can blow across. And the wind is blowing strongly and it's keeping up its breath, then you're gonna have some waves form, and that's what forms a wave. Yeah, and there's you know, there's other things that can impact it. Wind is the major thing, but you know, the depth of the water at the time, tides and currents, uh, if there's an island or something in the way, that's all going to affect it. But that big open fetches where you're gonna get your big, big waves, right, And that's a just a normal wave. What they think, what I should say one of the main theories for what causes a rogue wave, because just these normal circumstances don't account for a rogue wave. Right. You can point to any normal wave and be like, yeah, it's it's wind over this fetch and boom, there's your there's your seven ft ocean wave right with a roade wave. That doesn't necessarily apply. So they think one of the proposed theories is that road waves form when you have a current going one way and good sized wave going the other way, say from a storm. The current pushes up the wave and basically transfers when they run into each other, it transfers some energy so that the wave just gets freakishly large for a minute, and then all of a sudden, you've got your rogue wave. Yeah. So like if you have a really bad storm and in a thirty foot wave and it hits something like the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream might pick it up and say I'm gonna make you larger. Yeah, because I'm the Gulf Stream, I'm gonna make you a stop. But they have definitely found more evidence of road waves in some of these currents, like the Gulf Stream on the east coast of the US or the one of the two that's a current on the southward east coast of Africa. They project with maths that you could get a wave of as big as a hundred ninetet um But I don't know, but they definitely have chartered um charted a lot more waves along those streams and uh and currents. And actually, if if it is true, if it does pan out that currents, strong currents with waves running opposite to them causes rogue waves, they're saying, well, then the Gulf stream would account for why the Bermuda Triangle has so many das disappearance disappearances. I don't know if we mentioned that, and I don't think we did. We did one on the Bermuda Triangle that I'm sure we said, like like they were just a wave that swallowed him, But I don't know if we may have said rogue waves. It didn't stick out to me as a thing until I ran across this article though. Plus that was like eighty years ago. It was a hundred years ago. There's another explanation to um and this is basically the foundation of a mathematical incipal called the Peregrine solaton like this one. So the Peregrine Solatan is named after a mathematician named Peregrine, and he in the eighties predicted rogue waves like he. He mathematically proved that they were possible and showed how they would form. Yes he Um, I can't remember his first name. Was so British, so before that it was just like stories, yes, and then this guy comes along and proves that that a road wave can occur, and he's also even more awesome. He's he it's not just again, it's not just limited to ocean waves. It's he's saying, you can have this in optics, which has been proven in the lab. You can have it on the ocean, which has been proven in the lab simulation. And basically the whole thing with the Peregrine Solatan is that you have a normal wave and if you add just a little bit of noise to these predictable um formations of a wave, you can have a freakishly large steep wave that comes and goes fairly quickly. And that's a Peregrine solitan And they they've since shown that these things can't exist. Um, but he predicted it in like the eighties, like a good ten years before a rogue wave was ever recorded scientifically. Uh, Professor Peregrine came up with it. They named the Falcon after him to probably right. Uh, Well, there's also the wave reinforcement. Well, this is their related is part of it. Yeah, So basically waves getting together and becoming one large wave. Yeah, so that noise that you add into the normal process in this case, the wave reinforcement that noise would come from other waves got you. So the idea is, if let's say you have a ten foot wave passing over a twenty ft wave, that's going to be a thirty ft wave. Yeah, that's so neat. Or it can go in the other direction, and I guess it just has depend depends on how they meet each other. You can also subtract it. Yeah, so like a trough, Yeah, that's between the crest than the lowest point of the wave. Right If if the trough is like ut and a twenty foot wave runs into that, it drops down and just becomes a five foot wave. Yeah. But even the basic addition and subtraction, which makes it really exciting to me because I understand that kind of thing, not me. Addition and subtraction very basic if I have a calculator. But but they're they're saying like, if you have say five waves or ten waves, that five ft high, and the five ft high is the normal average in the area. But they all just happened to get together at this right point, they're going to turn into a fifty ft wave, a single fifty ft wave, and all of a sudden you have a rogue wave that just kind of comes out of nowhere. Or if you're in a bad storm, um, just a couple of large waves can form something pretty intimidating very fast. So we'll talk about how common these things might be coming up after the Alright, so, uh, they used to think they weren't so common. And like we said earlier, just the lore of of the sailor Navy strength gin exactly what is navy string? Is that just like a higher proof Oh my goodness, is it good? It's too much to jinny, It's no, it just it destroys you. It's not good for you. I've never thought the high high proof alcohols like to me. Adding the extra just takes away from the flavor a little bit for me. You know, like that crazy rum that's like navy strength throw them. Yeah, I guess so it is. It's like firewater. Yeah, it's navy strength through them and Navy strength strength gin. It used to be part of the British Sailors rations. There's there's only one reason to drink that stuff. But I mean it went away for a reason and then they brought it back and it's it's just crazy stuff crazy. They brought it back for college students. I mean there's I can't remember who makes it. I think Leopolds might make a navy strength gin. Yeah, it's it's rough and I love Leopolds Jim, but there's any navy strength gin I think would just be too much for me. Yeah, you get at older and you're not impressed by that stuff, you know, like when you're in college though, that's when you're like, this is five thousand proof. We're going to put it in some kool aid, and none of us are going to remember tonight. Nobody better be putting Leopold's gin in kool aid. I will find you look to your nearest college campus because it's probably happening. Uh So, Anyway, like we said, they used to think they were pretty rare. But um in two thousand four, the European Space Agency started collecting data from satellites and they basically want to see, like how often do these occur? Uh I've seen some different estimates, from three and ten thousand in the ocean to three and one thousand near coastal inlets and river mouths. Um, but I think what they found with their max wave project was ten waves eight two ft are higher. And that's from the s AS data, right, And that was over a period of three weeks. But the thing is is the previous weather data collection predicted that you get one every like fifty years, and all of a sudden, they saw ten in three weeks. So they're like, Okay, these things are way more common than we we thought. And like I said, they started to think, well, maybe this accounts for a lot of disappearances. Yeah. One thing they're gonna try and do with another program called wave Atlas is do surveys over a longer period of time, which um makes a lot of sense, of course, because that could have been a really rough three weeks. Yes, again it could have. It's like I was looking into shipping containers because the rogue wave caused to the worst shipping container losses in recent history. Uh huh? Or rogue waves did? I should say it wasn't just one, um, And I should say it's not necessarily just one. Apparently mathematically, it's also predicted that rogue waves tend to occur in threes for some reason, and I couldn't find out why. UM. But they're They're like, if you look at the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The account of that um from the captain of the Arthur Anderson, which is the ship that was going along with Lake uh Herea. I think when it wasn't Superior Um. They were out in a storm in November and the Arthur Anderson was hit by two thirty five foot waves, which is huge for the Great Lakes, and they lost sight of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the next thing they know, it's on the bottom of the Lake Superior broken into and they were like, well, clearly the rogue wave took it down. But there were two of them that night, and apparently there are plenty of accounts of not just one, but more than one rogue wave coming out of the Blue Well. And we got a great song out of it, Gordon Lightfoot, the Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. It's so odd that I guess that was just the time, but it seems weird that you get a big radio hit about a hip wreck that was when the AM stations dominated. Yeah, he's Canadian too, so that might explain a lot. I read a good article today on the lost art of the Fade out and songs. Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. Slight did a good article on it, and how you know, the biggest hits of the of the sixties and seventies and into the eighties even had those great fade outs you just you don't hear anymore. No. Well, one of the reasons why it's because it's so awkward to try to do that live. Like do you remember when Davy Jones guested on The Brady Bunch, Marcia was trying to get him to play the prom um He does the rendition of girl and then it fades out at the end while he's singing and he's like kind of singing like more softly. Well, that's because he's lived sinking to the recorded version, right, but I mean live, they would end them differently. Yeah, but he was supposedly in the studio and it's like fading as he's recording. It was just awkward to see and you could tell he felt uncomfortable. It's very awkward. Uh So, I think one of the last things we should cover is the differentiation between a rogue wave and a tsunami. We've done a podcast on tsunamis and the main differences is where it comes from and where it happens. Uh. Tsunami's aren't typically a ninety foot wall of water. A lot of times it's a five foot wall of water that just has such force and speed coming ashore that it does all kinds of damage. Well, yeah, depending on when where you see it. Because the rather than a wave like a normal wave, UM, where the energy is carried on top of the water because the wind whipped it up there, the tsunami is generated underwater, so the energy carries beneath the water. So when it hits that coast, all a sudden, it's pushed upward and you have a huge wall of water. But out in the ocean, you're like, look at how fast that three ft wave is traveling. Yeah, exactly, that's a tsunami. Plus again, we know what caused the tsunami, so it's not a rogue wave, and it's again not a huge towering wave on top of the water until it hits the coastline. That's right. Uh. And if your ship, um, you know, they can build you better and stronger to encounter harsher waves, but they're never gonna start building ships to withstand rogue waves because they're you know, they don't encounter them that often, and there's really nothing you can do if you come across a ninety ft wave, I mean the Empire State Building from the bottom to the you know kind of where the square part ends. It is a hundred and eleven feet. Can you imagine seeing a wave as tall as the Empire State Building. You can't build a ship that can withstand that. So basically, your your ballast is your stability, and they can build you as secure as possible, but there's really not much you can do top steer it as best you can and cross your fingers and pray. But also, you know, a greater understanding of how rogue waves come about, could you know, lead to improve safety less loss of life. Yeah. Maybe prediction I think is is the next wave if you will, like that's the only thing that's gonna be able to help is if you even a five minute heads up like this thing might be forming somewhere nearby, or sail around this area because that's a rogue wave city. Yeah, and no Opelio crab is worth it. You know. I saw this UM article they somebody did a study about shipping containers and UM the effect they have when they go overboard and apparently they provide nice little ecosystems when they hit the hit the bottom of the ocean, like they went and checked and they're like, okay, that's pretty great. Everything's just fine. They like the shipping containers down there, the artificial reefs right inadvertent ones. So that's it for rogue waves. If you want to learn more about it, you can type those two words into the search part how stuff works dot com. And since I said search part's time for the listener mail. I'm gonna call this help for my future. We've gotten a few of these where people ask for you know, like what should I do with my life? So I'm gonna read another one. First time email or longtime listener guys, I want to say your show has been with me through some very hard times. Your humor, friendship, and connection with your fans got me through the passing of my grandfather and a very hard breakup. So thanks for that. Uh. What I was hoping you could help me out with was this one more thing I feel lost with the path I am on in life. I'm a recent college grad from Western Washington. You with the bachelor's in history and a minor and web design. I'm now out in the working world, and I find it hard to decide what I want to do with my life. I've listened to past episodes where you answer fans who are written in, so I thought i'd give it a shot. Let it be clear, I am not a struggling college graduate. I've landed a steady, secure desk job, but after the first couple of months it's lost as luster and I feel myself becoming the stereotypical corporate drone. I'm impressed by the position you, too, have found yourself in. I want to know what advice you have for a young professional and scholar in this world. I need a career that has the potential to be fulfilling. More fulfilling than creating spreadsheets and TPS reports. That is from Kyle. TPS reports really exist, just like I think if people just use that phrase because they catch all from office space, but maybe it might be a real thing. That's Kyle. Yeah, Kyle, um. I thought about this a little bit. My advice to you is to not quit your job, but to do your soul searching on someone else's dime for a little while. If you've got a good job, you're way ahead of a lot of other people. So don't go quit in your job and saying, you know, I want to go open up a glamping operation in Colorado. Oh, it's the new thing with like high quality camping. Oh it's like the new butcher. Yes, sort of like a you know, you'll have a nice canvas tent in the woods with an actual bed and a rug and a lamp and a refrigerator and you charge people to go stay there. It sounds very nice. Yeah, it's not camping, it's lamping. But um, yeah, Kyle, So I would not suggest you, like go quit your job and run off and join the circus. How about that. That's easier, Kyle. I never have a heads up on stuff like this, so I never have any decent advice. But I definitely would side with Chuck on that one. Like if you if you got stability right now, that doesn't mean you're trapped. You're never trapped. Like, figure out what you want to do. Figure out what you can make decent money at that will make you happy. If it's not the job you're in, then there's your answer. Go figure out what that is, but do it in the context of your current job as well. It's almost across the board a bad idea to just quit your job and then figure out what you're going to do, Like that's not smart. Yeah, and these emails are sometimes stuff because Kyle, I can't decide what you like and what you joy. If you had written in and said, boy, I really love drawing cartoons or roller skating and long walks on the beach, right, but I am a corporate drone, then I would say, hey, maybe try and be a cartoonist. So you need to think about, sir, what you enjoy in life, of what inspires you. And there's probably a job scenario that fits that description. Yeah, and don't be discouraged about um having a history degree and not using it like that. It's becoming more and more prevalent to have a degree that you don't necessarily use. It just made you a more well rounded and interesting person and you learn the skills that you need to survive after college in college, no matter what your degree was. And you can always go to house stuff works dot com and look at the career s page. We actually have a career stage that is updated. And if they say there's jobs, there's jobs. Boom. Because I kind of feel like Kyle was asking a little bit for a job. Maybe well, thanks a lot, Kyle. We wish you the best to luck into everybody who finds himself or herself in a position similar to Cole's. We are crossing our fingers for you guys and sending you good vibes. Uh. And if you want to say hi to us in the interim, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can hang out with us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.