Le 'rogue waves' – monsters that can reach 20-30 meters in height – have been responsible for many disasters in the oceans, but also in the Mediterranean: see the case of cruise ship Louis Majesty, which was hit by two, perhaps three, 'walls' while sailing from Barcelona to Genoa on 3 March 2010 – water crashed through the windows 17 meters above the waterline, and two passengers died.
For a long time the origin, and sometimes the very existence, of rogue waves was questioned. But sophisticated mathematical models have made it possible to reconstruct and simulate the conditions that lead to these terrifying giants of the sea. Miguel Onorato, of the University of Turin, has been working on these models for many years and is part of an EU project called 'Extreme Seas' which intends to design hulls and bows capable of withstanding these impacts. The main tool used by Onorato is the non-linear Schrödinger equation, which has been used to explore particular situations in both classical and quantum physics.
The application of Onorato's model guides the live experiments, in large basins – one in Great Britain is 400 meters long – equipped with wave generators. Ships may one day carry instruments that, with a combination of external condition sensors and computers, indicate the likelihood of rogue waves forming along their route. For now, the main obstacle lies in the calculation capacity: the conditions that determine the formation of anomalous waves must take into account so many variables that every ship should have a supercomputer…
