The Impact News

Issue date: 2/8/10 Section: Impact Staff Blogs

Rogue Waves can devestate cruise ships [Click to enlarge]

BLOG 3/8 - First it was Titanic, and then it was Poseidon. Two movies with two wonderfully enormous cruise ships that tragically sink to the bottom of the sea, and have since kept me from boarding a cruise ship.

We all know the story of the non-fictional Titanic, which hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, where thousands of people died.

In 2006 it was Poseidon, the fictional adaptation of the 1969 novel by Paul Gallico, The Poseidon Adventure where a giant wave hits the ship causing it to turn over upside down in the Atlantic Ocean, and eventually sinks to the bottom.

My fears with Titanic were reassured when I realized how far technology has come since 1912, and if a huge passenger ship was to sustain such damage from hitting an ice-berg today help would certainly get there faster, then it did back then.

My fears for a giant wave hitting a ship like in Poseidon, however, are still there and after an incident that happened on the Mediterranean Sea last week my fears have risen again.

On March 3 a series of 26-foot wave hit a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea not far from the northeastern coast of Spain, which killed two of the passengers on board and left many others severely injured.

Scientists say that a wave this size could easily take out a two-story home.

Waves like this are known as rouge waves. Rogue waves are large spontaneous waves who are defined as waves whose height is more then twice the significant wave height. Rouge waves are not tsunamis for they are not set off by an earthquake, and usually occur in the middle of an ocean/sea.

Scientists still have no knowledge of how rogue waves occur, or how to predict them.

Last week, I never read a news story on this incident, I never even saw a story done on it on television. I was watching a program on CNN and saw a quick like blurb run across the ticker on the bottom of the screen that read, "Giant killer wave hits cruise ship in the Mediterranean and kills."

This is very frightening as millions of people board cruise ships every year, and not one story was done informing those of this tragedy.

I have never been much of a conspiracy theorist but with all the earthquakes going on and now these giant waves in the middle of sea, I am starting to think that something serious might be going on and the government is just not telling us.

Or maybe I have just watched 2012 one to many times.

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