In British Columbia, Canada, a rogue wave 18 meters high was measured in November 2020, a scientific study reveals.
A gigantic wave almost 18 meters, the height of a four-story building, arose in November 2020 off the coast of Ucluelet near Vancouver Island in British Columbia. This is, according to a study published in early February in the journal Scientific Reports, the highest “rogue” wave ever recorded. These waves have long remained maritime legends, attested by numerous testimonies but rarely measured with precision.
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Their particularity, which earned them the qualifier of scoundrel, is to occur in the open sea, in the absence of a storm, while the surrounding swell remains at a much lower amplitude. This type of event being as random as it is unpredictable, it is very difficult to study and its formation mechanisms still remain mysterious.
The one recorded in 2020 was measured by sensors placed on a buoy near the west coast of Vancouver Island. The data collected shows that it reaches a height three times greater than the surrounding waves. In absolute value, it is lower than the first rogue wave recorded in 1995 on an oil station in Norway and measured at 25 meters in the middle of waves of 12 meters, i.e. a ratio close to a simple to double. In Vancouver, the rogue wave behaved like a real giant in the middle of a swell not exceeding 6 meters.
“Proportionally, the Ucluelet wave is probably the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded,” said Johannes Gemmrich, a physics researcher at the University of Victoria and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports, in a press release. “Only a few rogue waves on the high seas have been directly observed, but never anything of this magnitude. The probability of such an event occurring is once in 1300 years.”
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