The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean - Couverture rigide

Casey, Susan

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0767928849 ISBN 13 : 9780767928847

Editeur : Doubleday, 2010

Synopsis

Book by Casey Susan

A propos du livre

Extrait

57.5° N, 12.7° W
175 MILES OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND
FEBRUARY 8, 2000

 
 
The  clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality—or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave ’s deep trough, it heeled twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incom- ing seas. What chance did they have, the forty-seven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong? A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a volcanic island nick- named Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding waters. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.
 
Captain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just as he ’d been doing for the past five days. While weather like this was common in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything he ’d encountered in his thirty years of experience. And worse, they kept rearing up from different directions. Flanking all sides of the
295-foot ship, the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren’t about to be sucker punched by a wave that was sneaking up from behind, or from the sides. No one wanted to be out here right now, but Avery

knew their only hope was to remain where they were, with their bow pointed into the waves. Turning around was too risky; if one of these waves caught Discovery broadside,  there would be long odds on survival. It takes thirty tons per square meter of force to dent a ship. A breaking hundred-foot wave packs one hundred tons of force per square meter and can tear a ship in half. Above all, Avery had to position Discovery so that it rode over these crests and wasn’t crushed beneath them.
 
He stood barefoot at the helm, the only way he could maintain trac- tion after a refrigerator toppled over, splashing out a slick of milk, juice, and broken glass (no time to clean it up—the waves just kept coming). Up on the bridge everything was amplified, all the night noises and motions, the slamming and the crashing, the elevator-shaft plunges into the troughs, the frantic wind, the swaying and groaning of the ship; and now, as the waves suddenly grew even bigger and meaner and steeper, Avery heard a loud bang coming  from Discovery’s foredeck.  He squinted in the dark to see that the fifty-man lifeboat had partially ripped from its two-inch-thick steel cleats and was pounding against the hull.
 
Below deck, computers and furniture had been smashed into pieces. The scientists huddled in their cabins nursing bruises, black eyes, and broken ribs. Attempts at rest were pointless. They heard the noises too; they rode the free falls and the sickening barrel rolls; and they worried about the fact that a six-foot-long window next to their lab had already shattered from the twisting.  Discovery was almost forty years old, and recently she ’d undergone major surgery. The ship had been cut in half, lengthened by thirty-three feet, and then welded back together. Would the joints hold? No one really knew. No one had ever been in conditions like these.
 
One of the two chief scientists, Penny Holliday, watched as a chair skidded out from under her desk, swung into the air, and crashed onto her bunk. Holliday, fine boned, porcelain-doll pretty, and as tough as any man on board the ship, had sent an e-mail to her boyfriend, Craig Harris, earlier in the day. “This isn’t funny anymore,” she wrote.  “The ocean just looks completely out of control.” So much white spray was whipping off the waves that she had the strange impression of being in a blizzard. This was Waveland all right, an otherworldly place of constant motion that took you nowhere but up and down; where there was no sleep, no comfort, no connection to land, and where human eyes and stomachs struggled to adapt, and failed.
 
Ten days ago Discovery had left port in Southampton, England, on what Holliday had hoped would be a typical three-week trip to Iceland and back (punctuated by a little seasickness perhaps, but nothing major). Along the way they’d stop and sample the water for salinity, temperature, oxygen, and other nutrients. From these tests the scientists would draw a picture of what was happening out there, how the ocean’s basic character- istics were shifting, and why.
 
These are not small questions on a planet that is 71 percent covered in salt water. As the Earth’s climate changes—as the inner atmosphere becomes warmer, as the winds increase, as the oceans heat up—what does all this mean for us? Trouble, most likely, and Holliday and her colleagues were in the business of finding out how much and what kind. It was deeply frustrating for them to be lashed to their bunks rather than out on the deck lowering their instruments. No one was thinking about Iceland anymore.
 
The trip was far from a loss, however. During the endless trains of massive waves, Discovery itself was collecting data that would lead to a chilling revelation. The ship was ringed with instruments; everything that happened out there was being precisely measured, the sea’s fury captured in tight graphs and unassailable numbers. Months later, long after Avery had returned everyone safely to the Southampton docks, when Holliday began to analyze these figures, she would discover that the waves they had experienced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The significant wave height, an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves, was sixty-one feet, with frequent spikes far beyond that. At the same time, none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models—the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely—had predicted these behemoths. In other words, under this particular set of weather conditions, waves this size should not have existed. And yet they did.
 
 
History is full of eyewitness accounts of giant waves, monsters in the hundred-foot range and beyond, but until very recently scientists dis- missed them. The problem was this: according to the basic physics of ocean waves, the conditions that would produce a hundred-footer were so far beyond rare as to virtually never happen. Anyone who claimed to have seen one, therefore, was engaging in nautical tall tales or outright lies.
 
Still, it was hard to discount a report from the polar hero Ernest Shackleton, hardly the type for hysterical exaggeration. On his crossing from Antarctica to South Georgia Island in April 1916, Shackleton noticed odd movements in the night sky. “A moment later, I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but the white crest of an enor- mous wave,” he wrote. “During 26 years experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days.” When the wave hit his ship, Shackleton and his crew were “flung forward like a cork,” and the boat flooded. Fast bailing and major luck were all that saved them from capsizing. “Earnestly  we hoped that never again would we encounter such a wave.”
 
The men on the 850-foot cargo ship München would have seconded that, if any of them had survived their rendezvous with a similar wave on December 12, 1978. Considered unsinkable, the München was a cutting- edge craft, the flagship of the German  Merchant Navy. At 3:25 a.m. frag- ments of a Morse code Mayday, emanating from 450 miles north of the Azores, signaled that the vessel had suffered grave damage from a wave. But even after 110 ships and 13 aircraft were deployed—the  most com- prehensive search in the history of shipping—the ship and its twenty- seven crew were never seen again. A haunting clue was left behind: searchers found one of the München’s lifeboats, usually stowed sixty-five feet above the water, floating empty. Its twisted metal fittings indicated that it had been torn away. “Something extraordinary” had destroyed the ship, concluded the official report.
 
The München’s disappearance   points to the main problem with proving the existence of a giant wave: if you run into that kind of night- mare, it ’s likely to be the last one you’ll have. The force of waves is hard to overstate. An eighteen-inch wave can topple a wall built to withstand 125-mile-per-hour winds, for instance, and coastal advisories are issued for even five-foot-tall surf, which regularly kills people caught in the wrong places. The number of people who have witnessed a hundred-foot wave at close range and made it back home to describe the experience is a very small one.
 
Even if a ship does manage to survive a hundred-foot wall of water, there are no underwhelmed survivors. Big fish tales are human nature. Add to that a dose of mortal terror, honest confusion, a fear of being blamed for damage to the ship—if, say, the wave didn’t quite measure up to the “something extraordinary” test but managed to poleax the vessel anyway because the captain was below deck playing darts and drinking vodka at the time—and what you’ve got is less than the scientifically immaculate truth.
 
But there was a rare occasion in 1933, when a sharp-eyed naval offi- cer aboard the 478-foot oil carrier USS Ramapo happened to be up on the bridge as an astonishing wave lurched out of the Pacific and his response, rather than screaming and covering his eyes, was to make a trigonometric calculation using the ship’s dimensions relative to the wave ’s crest and trough. The result was a height estimate that, if not on par with the exac- titude of the Discovery’s sensors, was at least defensible. And the officer’s measurement? The wave was 112 feet high.
 
If a 112-foot wave isn’t freakish enough, consider that this one had leaped out of 45-foot seas. Thus it was more than twice the average size of anything else in the Ramapo’s path, which matches the scientific defi- nition for a freak (or rogue) wave. For centuries mariners had spoken of the “hole in the ocean,” a cavernous trough at the base of an abnormally large wave, and the “three sisters,” a series of freaks in rapid succession. To scientists this kind of folklore was a hard sell. The numbers didn’t add up. Maybe, just maybe, a once-in-an-aeon wave triple the size of its sur- rounding seas might exist—but there was no way traditional oceanogra- phy could accept this as a typical occurrence. As for the notion of mutant walls of water showing up in sets, that was not even worth discussing. Then something happened that no one could ignore.
 
On January  1, 1995, the North  Sea was feisty due to a pair of storms, a brutish one crawling northward and a smaller one moving southward to meet it. Statoil’s Draupner oil-drilling platform sat somewhere between them, about one hundred miles off the tip of Norway. For the crew who lived on the rig it was a New Year’s Day of thirty-eight-foot seas rolling by, as measured by the laser wave recorder on the platform’s underside. Unpleasant, perhaps, but not especially dramatic—until three o’clock in the afternoon, when an eighty-five-foot wave came careening over the horizon and walloped the rig at forty-five miles per hour. While the Draupner sustained only moderate damage, the proof was there. This wasn’t a case of laser malfunction or too many aquavit toasts the night before. It was the first confirmed measurement of a freak wave, more than twice as tall and steep as its neighbors, a teetering maniac ripping across the North Sea.
 
They were out there all right. You could call them whatever you wanted—rogues, freaks, giants—but the bottom line was that no one had accounted for them. The engineers who’d built the Draupner rig had cal- culated that once every ten thousand years the North Sea might throw them a sixty-four-foot curveball in thirty-eight-foot  seas. That would be the maximum. Eighty-five-foot waves were not part of the equation, not in this universe anyway. But the rules had changed. Now scientists had a set of numbers that pointed to an unsettling truth: some of these waves make their own rules. Suddenly the emphasis shifted from explaining why giant waves couldn’t simply leap out of the ocean to figuring out how it was that they did.
 
This was a matter of much brow sweat for the oil industry, which would prefer that its multimillion-dollar rigs not be swept away. It had happened before. In 1982 the Ocean Ranger, a 400-foot-long, 337-foot- high oil platform located 170 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, was struck by an outsize wave in heavy weather. We ’ll never know how big the wave was exactly, for there were no survivors. Approved for “unre- stricted ocean operations,” built to withstand 110-foot seas and 115-mile- per-hour winds, considered “indestructible” by its engineers, the Ocean Ranger had capsized and sank close to instantly, killing all eighty-four people on board.
 
In the nautical world things were even more troubling. Across the global seas ships were meeting these waves, from megaton vessels like the München—oceangoing freighters and tankers and bulk carriers—down to recreational sailboats. At best, the encounters resulted in damage; at worst, the boat vanished, taking all hands with it. “Two large ships sink every week on average [worldwide], but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to ‘bad weather,’ ” said Dr. Wolfgang Rosenthal, senior scientist for the MaxWave Project, a con- sortium of European scientists that convened in 2000 to investigate the disappearing ships.
 
While Rosenthal’s numbers may be high, his point is well taken. Given the lack of survivors or evidence, exact statistics of ships scuttled by giant waves are impossible to come by; but it is clear that every year, on average, more than two dozen large ships sink or otherwise go miss- ing, taking their crews along with them. (If you also consider smaller ves- sels, the numbers are vastly higher.) In particular, a type of ship known as a bulk carrier is vulnerable:  on one infamous occasion in March 1973, two
bulk carriers were lost within an hour of each other in the same area of the North Atlantic.
 
When I first read about the missing ships, I was astonished. In the high-tech marine world of radar, EPIRB, GPS, and satellite surveillance, how could hundreds of enormous vessels just get swallowed up by the sea? And furthermore, how could this be happening without much media notice? Imagine the headlines if even a single 747 slipped off the map with all its passengers and was never heard from again.
 
Clearly, there was something extraordinary  going on out there. After the Draupner incident, it became undeniable: no one really had a clue as to how waves behaved in their most extreme forms. Yet...

Revue de presse

"[Susan Casey] examines big waves from every angle, and goes in deep with those who know the phenomenon most intimately....Casey makes a convincing, entertaining case (nifty cliffhangers and all) that there is a heretofore little-known monster in our midst....She pushes the scientists on the big question.....Casey is fluent in 'gnarly' and proficient in 'wonk,' and she writes lucidly so the rest of us can come along for the ride. Her wonderfully vivid, kinetic narrative....offers a prescient vision of watery perils--and sometimes, bittersweet triumphs....Amid the images of demolition, Casey hangs on to the magic and beauty of waves."--New York Times Book Review

"You think Jaws made you fear the ocean? In this adrenaline rush of a book, Casey....describes 'nature's biggest tantrum'....Her eerie, majestic descriptions...make THE WAVE an unsettling thrill ride that's as terrifying as it is awe inspiring."--People

"Immensely powerful, beautiful, addictive and, yes, incredibly thrilling....takes the reader into the hearts and minds of the world's renowned surfers....Through the eyes of the surfers, readers get a remarkable sense of how they choose their waves, the skill that it takes to rocket across them, what it feels like to fall, what happens when surfers and Jet Skis are flung into coral reefs, what it's like to be rolled and pounded by tons of water, and what it is like physically and psychologically to be held under for too long - how some surfers make it back to the surface, and others drown.
But "The Wave" is far more than a book about surfing. Casey's quest is also to understand the characteristics of giant waves and rogue waves. She explores the impact giant waves have on ships, oil rigs, fishing boats and passenger ships.....Casey explains the science of waves in a straightforward but always engaging manner.....Casey also illuminates recent mind-boggling discoveries.....Casey unlocks the mysteries of waves in her fascinating and enlightening book. And like a surfer who is happily hooked, the reader simply won't be able to get enough of it."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Susan Casey's white-knuckle chronicle — which follows the surfers pursuing the waves and the scientists struggling to understand them — delivers a thrill so intense you may never get in a boat again."--Entertainment Weekly

"[A] thrilling tale"--Time

"Casey does an exceptional job of explaining the natural forces (winds, currents, ocean-bottom shape) that create these daunting, at times fatal, surfing spots....Casey's account of the impromptu adventure is terrific"--Wall Street Journal

"Gripping....we are thankful she included us on the ride."--The Washington Post

"The book dives deeply into the world of top-level surfers....Casey does a commendable job of surveying the broader problems confronting wave studies....compelling and wonderfully detailed....engrossing....Casey adroitly moves beyond what we think we know about big-wave surf culture and churns out a series of action chapters that are not for the faint of heart."--Los Angeles Times

"Reading the 'The Wave' is almost like riding one, paddling in the expositional surf of vivid imagery and colorful description, thrown at you in ever-escalating surges"--Cleveland Plain Dealer


"Extraordinary....fascinating, heroic, dazzling, terrifying, amazing, unbelievable, mesmerizing, instructive, enlightening, superb. This is the Dragon Tattoo, Moby Dick, Into Thin Air for our time; a powerful, articulate ride into a world you never knew existed but that you will never, never forget. I am honoured to write this review. Bravo, Susan Casey.-- Globe and Mail (Canada)

"Utterly engrossing"--Salon

"A fabulous page-turner" –John Hockenbery, NPR

"[A] captivating hybrid--an intro to the mind-melting physics of waves and a ride-along with the scientists and surfers who chase after them...Fascinating"
-- Men's Journal

"[A] breath-snatching thrill ride"
--Elle

"Casey pursues....with tenacity and literary grace....a powerful voice in adventure writing....delves into the science....masterful"--Outside

"ffers a probing look at both the passionate and the pragmatic sides of these oceanic wonders....compelling reading"---Bookpage

“Something is stewing in our seas, and Susan Casey—traveling, and in some cases swimming, all around the world—is eager to find out what it is. Both a rollicking look at the ocean’s growing freakishness and a troubling examination of our ailing planet, The Wave gives new meaning to the term ‘immersion reporting.’”
—Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail, Blood and Thunder, and Ghost Soldiers

“At once scary and fun, The Wave surprises at every turn.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

“Like the surfers and scientists she profiles, Casey lived and breathed giant waves for years. Casey combines an insane passion for craft with an uncanny ability to describe the indescribable. In The Wave she whisks the reader off to unimaginably surreal settings and puts them in the middle of mind-blowing scenarios. This book sucked me in like the undertow at Pipeline.”
—Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Packing for Mars

“Reading The Wave is the closest most of us will ever come to the sensation of riding, or even seeing, one of these towering monsters of the sea. It’s exhilarating, astonishing, and, not infrequently, terrifying. Brace yourself.”
—Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt

"THE WAVE is an amazing look at humble yet larger-than-life people who live by daring feats, honorable acts, and selfless denial-- in short, these guys don't care if anyone is looking as they attempt what seems impossible: riding waves the size of ten story sky scrapers. Casey was there in the middle of the action, and she writes with such precision about such strange, wondrous things, that it seems that many objects rising out of the ocean in this book belong only to mythology. Terrifying, beautiful, her prose is shot through with the haunting half-light of a storm. You can hear the waves crashing on your head as you read. I'm not kidding. You feel the waves grow with each turn of the page."
--Doug Stanton , author of Horse Soldiers and In Harm’s Way
 
"This book is adrenalin. You don't want to surf the waves described herein. Read the book. It's safer that way."
--Eddie Vedder

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0767928849
• ISBN 13: 9780767928847
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 326
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible