SS El Faro

Hurricanes, Rogue Waves, Rogue Wave Holes, and the Three Sisters

Do you ever go on Wikipedia research spirals?  I end up on them all the time.  My most recent lengthy one began with this Yankee Magazine article, "A Fatal Mistake | The Sinking of El Faro," which brought me to the Wikipedia page for SS El Faro, which somehow led to researching rogue waves and rogue wave holes and the MS München as well as the Three Sisters waves and the SS Edmund Fitzgerald amongst other well known incidents.

This was all particularly interesting to me given my prior experience working as an assistant vessel operator in dry bulk shipping.  While steering-into-a-hurricane-leads-to-calamity is an unsurprising notion to me, I was not aware of the phenomenon of rogue waves prior to this research spiral; science itself wasn't really aware either until 1995!  It's amazing and kind of simultaneously exciting and terrifying to me that there is still so much about this world that we don't know or understand.