Freak waves spotted from space (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Freak waves spotted from space (2004)

news.bbc.co.uk

101 pointshardik18 comments

I always find it amusing how little we know about most of our planet. Then I get sad at the vast amount of scientists losing their jobs or having to work for large-company-for-profit since they can't get enough funding to research what they want.

Maybe we need to start getting scientists to use Kickstarter? "For $400,000 I can make some serious headway into rogue wave research and will publish all of my data in real time!" I'd toss a couple hundred at projects like this.

On a side note we need a website and very simple API for scientists to publish research in real time... with a not-horrible interface like most science websites have.

Awesome idea!! I wish this comment was an actual item in the top news of HN.

This exists. Petridish.org lets people help fund projects that wouldn't otherwise get off the ground, Kickstarter style

Indeed, this does cover the first part, they need to work on getting their name out there cause I've never seen this website before... Now for the 2nd part!

Results of the MAXWAVE Project

W. Rosenthal

Institute of Coastal Research, Geesthacht, Germany

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/PubServices/2005pdfs/Rosenthal.p...

On an average two large ships sink every week? Really? That's way too high than what I had expected. Can anyone cite a source for this info?

It's hard to get to the data but have a look at the latest vessel casualties in the right hand column:

http://www.lloydslistintelligence.com/

Also, the project site leeds to http://coast.gkss.de/projects/maxwave/workp/wp4/wp4.html where you can find a map of ship casualties for a 4 year period http://coast.gkss.de/projects/maxwave/workp/wp4/casualties.j...

I am surprised myself, but 2 a week actually seems low!

Thanks for the links. Googling some of the ships listed as casualties led me to this page http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/News/Home.html

So it looks like the ships are not necessarily lost, and some of them aren't all that big...

Yeah true - I think gravitystorm's comment is quite accurate when it comes down to big vessels.

I did a bit more googling and found this site:

http://www.cargolaw.com/presentations_cas.index.html

Even though it looks this site is hosted on geocities, there are links to current vessel casualties with details to damage, human casualties, etc.

No - but it seems like that figure is wrong on two counts - greater than the actual number of ships of that size lost in that timeframe (142), and those ships weren't sunk by rogue waves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave#Loss_estimates

This article is from 2004. For more information on the project as well as the ugliest site you could possibly imagine, visit http://coast.gkss.de/projects/maxwave/

Edit: Apparently parts of their server have sunk as well.

I highly recommend visiting the site. It made me laugh. But then it made me sad. It's like visiting a house after it has been abandoned.

Statistics about ship losses in this article are utterly wrong. The Wikipedia article below explicitly calls out the press release this article appears to be based upon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave#Loss_estimates

Summary of ocean surface topography measurement using satellite altimetry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_surface_topography

Not really related to wave size.

Out of curiosity, I went looking to see if this data has translated into thinking about ship design:

http://66.180.169.221/pdf/2007symp09.pdf

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/PubServices/2005pdfs/Rosenthal.p...

http://www.ifremer.fr/web-com/molagnon/bv/Faulkner_w.pdf

Article about the follow-up study from the German Space Agency, including some kind of map.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/18245/

Freak waves and 2004 - thought it was about the 2004 tsunami.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com