Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [50]
When Whitemarsh set out in late January of 1933, the longstanding dogma since the days of Archibald MacRae was still held as a scientific truth. Wind-driven waves could only grow as high as 60 feet. Anything higher would be pulled down by simple gravity. Thus, all the tales of taller waves were categorized as wild-eyed, rum-laced myth.
After delivering a full load of fuel to the Pacific fleet in Manila, the Ramapo was following another of her great circle sounding routes. She was well north of the Hawaiian Islands and their ports, and her sole link to the outside world was a shortwave radio, whose antenna was stretched between a pair of masts.
Had that antenna given Whitemarsh the benefit of satellite imagery, he might have asked Mayo to steer a different course, for the Ramapo was about to become a tiny pawn in a global atmospheric upheaval. A La Niña weather event of epic proportions was already underway. Cold and snowfall records were being set from Belfast to Kamchatka to Manhattan. On January 11, a hurricane-force gale had lashed the entire California coastline, destroying 130 oil derricks and spawning nearshore waves that swept sailors from the decks of four U.S. warships—including an aircraft carrier. Farther north, blizzards gave Crater Lake, Oregon, a January snowfall of 256 inches, and the mountain town of Seneca, Oregon, recorded temperatures of forty below—records that still stand. On the upside, a newly sworn-in President Roosevelt was about to repeal prohibition, allowing Americans to legally drown their sorrows, and they’d need to. That summer, twenty-one tropical systems—a record lasting until 2005—would form in the Atlantic Ocean, devastating the Chesapeake Bay, North Carolina, and Texas. By November 1933, ceaseless winds would begin scouring the topsoil from drought-stricken farms in the Dakotas and dropping red snow on Chicago. It was the dawn of the Dust Bowl.
The January storm began off the eastern coast of Russia, when a vicious surge of polar high pressure blasted Siberia and swept out across the Pacific at fifty miles an hour. In the wake of this surge, the temperature in a barren outpost called Oymyakon plunged to ninety degrees below zero—the coldest temperature ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere.
Within a few feet of reaching open Russian waters, minute vertical pressure changes in the air caused tiny, almost invisible deformations—scientists call them capillary waves—to form on the water’s surface. These gave a rough texture for the horizontal winds to grab, causing the water molecules to begin to vibrate in a circular motion. By a hundred yards offshore, that circular motion had manifested in the form of diminutive wind waves, whose peaks formed rows of miniature sails and whose troughs carried a rotating eddy of air that furthered them along.
By the time these sails, or swells, had been pushed twenty-five miles offshore, the insistent wind had morphed them into orbital columns—somewhat akin to a line of logs rolling downhill—around 11 feet high, with a period between their troughs and crests of seven seconds. Most of the energy of these swells was not at the surface of the water, but below it, reaching down at least as far as forty feet. After another 250 miles of wind, the swells were more gently rounded but were now averaging around 27 feet high with a far longer thirteen-second period and an energy column four hundred feet deep.
And they kept growing.
The jet stream pushed the Siberian front as far as the International Dateline a few days later. There it began to interact with one storm centered just above Hawaii and another near Dutch Harbor, Alaska. The dense air of the frigid high pulled a vast plume of sultry, low-pressure air from a dying tropical depression far into the North Pacific. The winds around the high funneled into the lows, fueling a precipitous drop in barometric pressure, a condition meteorologists call “explosive cyclogenesis,” or just as