- In the 1970s, one of the first successful disaster movies
was "The Poseidon Adventure," the story of survivors on a cruise
ship that was upended by a giant wave.
-
- Rumors of giant waves suddenly appearing in otherwise
calm seas have persisted for years, but most scientists pooh-poohed the
idea as something that happens only once in a millennium.
-
- Those scientists were wrong. The giant waves do exist.
European scientists decided to do a study, and in Project MaxWave assigned
two satellites to look for giant waves. In one three-week period, the satellites
spotted 10 of them, all more than 81 feet tall.
-
- Like me, you were probably unaware that during the past
20 years, more than 200 supercarrier cargo ships have been lost at sea.
These losses do not get the study or attention that airplane crashes get.
They are usually just written off as due to "bad weather." Now
scientists think that these mysterious giant waves might be a factor in
some of the losses.
-
- Sizable ships are lost on an average of two a week, according
to Wolfgang Rosenthal of the GKSS Research Center in Germany, where the
MaxWave project is headquartered. He said that recently two cruise ships
were badly damaged in the South Atlantic by giant waves.
-
- All of this merely confirms my own disinclination to
ride a craft in deep water, which I define as anything over my 5-feet-8-inch
height. Of course, I have been to sea. I've crossed the Atlantic twice
in ships and several times by air, and I've been a guest on carriers and
destroyers during brief deep-water cruises. Nevertheless, my seafaring
has always been a necessity of my job, not a recreational choice.
-
- I love to read sea stories for the same reason other
people like to read horror stories - for the vicarious thrill of being
scared. I could easily be persuaded to leave an airplane if I had a parachute,
but it would take considerable effort to pry me loose from a ship at sea.
The sinking of the Titanic remains for me one of the all-time biggest horror
stories, and two adventures I am most happy to have missed are the "Murmansk
Run" during World War II and sailing through the Magellan Strait at
any time.
-
- The Murmansk Run was the effort by the American merchant
marine to resupply the Soviet Union by threading the gauntlet of German
submarines into the Arctic seas surrounding Northern Russia. If there is
anything I hate worse than deep water, it is deep water that is killing-cold.
The Magellan Strait is that stretch of cold, stormy water at the bottom
of South America.
-
- I am a great believer in conforming to natural law, and
there is a reason God made man without gills or webbed feet and hands.
We are land animals. Dry earth is our natural habitat, and the sea belongs
to the sharks and other critters of the deep. Since sharks are kind enough
to stay out of my back yard, I stay out of theirs. I believe this so deeply
that despite growing up in a Navy town, when my turn at military service
came along I chose the Army. I'll take a rifle and a shovel any day over
a life jacket and a thin steel plate between me and thousands of feet of
dark water.
-
- At any rate, the Europeans are continuing their study,
hoping to learn what causes these mountainous waves to arise suddenly out
of a calm sea and to find out where they most often occur.
-
- I thought you ought to know about this, as well as the
fact that piracy on the high seas continues at a very high rate - another
phenomenon the news media do not cover - just in case you were contemplating
a sea voyage.
-
- We might have learned how to destroy the life of the
sea with appalling overfishing and pollution, but the seas retain the ability
to destroy our lives, too. I have nothing against the cruise industry,
but there are plenty of lovely places to visit within the high-water marks
on our Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf shores. As for the sea, I prefer the
view from the shore, preferably through a plate-glass window.
-
- © 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
|
