Until 1995, most scientists dismissed sudden, unexpected swells known as rogue waves as maritime myth. Last year he claimed to have surfed a 100-footer also at Nazare, but the height hasn’t been confirmed. Garrett McNamara holds the record for the largest wave ever surfed, set in 2011 in Nazare, Portugal. It killed some 200,000 people, making it the deadliest wave known. The Indian Ocean tsunami ten years ago traveled at speeds reaching 500 miles per hour and barged up to a mile inland. At least ten people are believed to have died there. It tosses boarders directly into a shallow reef. The Banzai Pipeline in Oahu, Hawaii, gets our vote for the most dangerous surf wave. Teahupo’o, Tahiti’s waves are modest in height but surfers call the thick lips the world’s “heaviest.”Īs the tide comes in on Hangzhou, China, a wave called the Silver Dragon travels up the Qiantang River, opposite the direction of the river’s flow. Energy distributed throughout the water column and wavelengths extending a hundred miles give them frightening stability. Unlike the waves we enjoy at the beach, tsunami waves don’t break because they don’t get steep enough. Now much of the energy that had been propelling the wave forward has nowhere to go but up, so the wave grows taller. A wave approaching a shoreline meets shallower and shallower water, slowing the wave’s leading edge. But what creates waves the size of office buildings, including the ones big-wave surfers covet and coastal dwellers fear? In a word, land. Winds at sea generate waves that average ten feet high during storms, 30-footers are common. The biggest, baddest waves aren’t born that way.
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