As noted in our recent review, I found Susan Casey’s The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean to be very disappointing because it spends far more time with extreme surfer dudes than it does examining rogue or freak waves. The same can not be said of a BBC documentary first aired on November 14, 2002 called “Freak Waves.” In addition to an in depth look at ships struck by rogue waves, it also features a fascinating discussion, in wholly accessible language, of how the nonlinear Schrödinger equation can closely approximate rogue waves, an outcome that surprised even the mathematicians. This could explain why all the equations, which oceanographers have used to explain that rogue waves cannot exist, may be all wrong.
By the magic of Youtube, the documentary is available as five 10 minute clips:
Watch the rest of the documentary after the jump.
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One of the largest port complexes in the US has been shut down since Sunday morning after a barge accident almost knocked a high voltage tower into the Houston Ship Channel. Over thirty ships have been blocked by the shut down of the ship channel. An economic loss of almost $1 billion is estimated to result from the shutdown. The ship channel is not expected to open until at least Tuesday night.
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This week 1,000 Royal Navy Medical Officer Journals were made available to the public at the British National Archives in Kew. The journals are revealing, if often disturbing by modern standards. From drunken mutinies to disease outbreaks to a walrus attack, the journals paint a colorful picture of 18th- and 19th-century ship life.
Given all the reporting on piracy off the Horn of Africa, we hear very little about another crisis – the flood of refugees fleeing the instability and chaos of Somalia’s clan wars. Last year 74,000 people crossed the Gulf of Aden in smugglers’ boats to reach Yemen, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Yesterday we posted that scientists are not sure where all the plastic floating in the vast Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches is going. Sadly, the answer is probably not that a big vacuum cleaner is vacuuming the stuff up to recycle it. Nevertheless, here is a great story about