I'm Steve Strogatz and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine that

takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

In this episode, we're going to ask, what causes the monster waves in the ocean known as rogue

waves? Throughout human times, the oceans have swirled with all sorts of legends.

Think of the flying Dutchman ghost ship that disappeared during a storm in the 1600s

and is now forced to sail the seas forever.

Or the reptilian sea serpents that fishermen swear have menacingly popped up from the surface of the water.

Or the sirens of Greek mythology who lure sailors to their deaths with their soothing, seductive songs.

We know all of these to be myths, but there's one mystery of the sea that is not a myth, and it can be deadly.

Rogue waves. These are giant waves that seemingly

come out of nowhere. They can slam into ships or hit oil platforms. And because the ocean is so big,

with so many factors, they're really hard to study because they're difficult to actually witness.

One of the most famous is called the Draupner Wave. It struck the

Dropner Gas Pipeline platform in the North Sea in 1995, reaching an astounding maximum height

of 25.6 meters or 84 feet. That's about the size of a six to eight-story building. It was the first time a rogue wave was ever measured with instruments.

Capturing a rogue wave in the vast ocean is rare, so we still know relatively little about them.

But scientists like Ton Van Denbremmer are trying to change that.

Dr. Van denbremmer uses wave pools and modeling to study rogue waves at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

He's an associate professor of civil engineering and geosciences and also a senior research fellow at the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.

Ton, thanks so much for joining us today to talk about rogue waves. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Well, I'm really looking forward to this. It's a fascinating subject. Let us start with just the basic issue of characterizing them. What makes a rogue wave rogue? Like how is it different from the ordinary ocean waves that we see at the beach or tell us a little more about how big they are, how fast they can

travel. Usually you have a lot of waves, right? So you can compare one to the next. And that's indeed

what you do. So you look at basically a characterization of what we call the sea state. So this is an

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