Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

Rogue waves on the ocean can swamp ships from out of nowhere.

They were thought to be caused by two different mechanisms, but a new idea has the

potential to predict them all. Two weeks before Christmas in 1978, the cargo ship,

MS. Munchin encountered a fierce storm in the North Atlantic. The captain couldn't evade it,

but the ship was more than two and a half

times the length of a football field, so the forecasted waves and winds shouldn't have been a threat.

At midnight, an operator radioed to a cruise ship. Have a good trip and see you soon. Three hours

later, the Munchen put out a distress call.

Then, silence.

The West German vessel and its 28-person crew vanished. They left behind four lifeboats, three shipping containers, and a handful of flotation devices.

One clue in particular stumped investigators.

A recovered lifeboat was originally bolted to the Moonschen about 65 feet above the water. It appeared to have been ripped from that perch by a tremendous force hurtling toward the ship's stern. Rumors circulated that a monstrous

wave had crashed onto the deck from above, but such a swell was, at the time, unthinkable.

West Germany's Maritime Board of Inquiry eventually declared it impossible to explain the cause of the sinking.

Mariners have known for centuries what researchers have documented only in recent decades.

The ocean is a far more dangerous place than common sense would suggest.

Data-driven researchers long struggled to square sailors' tales of monstrous rogue waves with the expectation that wave heights

vary like human heights. They cluster around an average with a few outliers dotting the thin

tails of a bell curve. Sure, you might get a wave twice as tall as its neighbors, in theory,

...