Cowabunga! 64-foot wave detected in Southern Ocean
Recently installed buoy records event south of New Zealand
Surf’s up in the Southern Ocean.
A 64-foot-high wave was measured by an automated buoy Saturday about 400 miles south of New Zealand in the Southern Ocean.
That’s taller than a six-story building.
“This is one of the largest waves recorded in the Southern Hemisphere,” said oceanographer Tom Durrant of Met-Ocean Solutions, a private weather firm in New Zealand.
“This is the world’s southernmost wave buoy moored in the open ocean, and we are excited to put it to the test in large seas,” he wrote on the company’s blog.
The buoy was installed only three months ago to “get valuable observations from this remote part of the ocean,” the company said. The wild winds, seas and storms of the Southern Ocean create some of the biggest waves in the world.
“Southern Ocean waves are described by sailors as ‘liquid Himalayas’ and remain largely unstudied, including our ability to forecast them,” said researcher Sally Garrett of the New Zealand Defence Force shortly after the buoy was launched.
“Accurate measurements of these conditions will help us understand waves and air-sea interactions in these extreme conditions,” Durrant said. “This, in turn, will lead to improvements in the models used to simulate the waves, providing better forecasts, both for the Southern Ocean and for the wider region.”
The official world record biggest wave remains a 62-foot-tall monstrosity that was measured in the North Atlantic on Feb. 4, 2013, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That was the average measurement of 15 to 20 waves over a period of about 10 minutes, which is the way record waves are measured.
Using this criteria, this weekend’s wave in the Southern Ocean doesn’t measure up: The wave average for the minutes before and after the 64-foot wave was “only” about 34 feet.
No ships were reported near the wave, and the wave did not approach any land areas.