Fenn 12 2022 - Rogue Waves on the Radar

 

Waves are definitely on the brain - Waves of COVID, waves to truck convoys, waves of democracy.  It is waves in nature that got my attention yesterday.    A rogue wave in B.C. was covered by the weather network news.  It is a record-breaking wave that was measured November 17 2020 and has since been determined to be the biggest rogue wave ever measured on the Canadian west coast.  It was 17.6 m tall  - that's a four story building. You can see the spike on the chart below.  This is a once in 1300 years occurrence.   The same article said that on the other side of Canada, waves produced during 2004's Hurricane Ivan rose to more than 28 metres tall and one in particular was 30 m. That's an 8 storey building.  Here's the chart of the BC rogue wave.   This famous painting - the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusi is considered to be an example of a large rogue wave. I went looking for the biggest wave in recorded history - it is a tsunami wave. That is different than a rogue wave.  It was recorded July 9 1958 in Alaska and reached 1,720 feet high - the comparison given in the article is the Empire State Building which is 1,250 feet tall. The wave was caused by an earthquake - it is known as the Lituya Bay Tsunami.  "As the giant mountain of water started traveling across the entire length of the T-shaped Lituya Bay, it reached a peak height of 1,720 feet (524 meters) near the Gilbert Inlet and destroyed everything around.  Soil, plants, and trees were snapped off, and the shorelines were completely obliterated." While the Alaska wave was caused by a tsunami,  the 2020 BC wave was a rogue wave.  Rogue waves are considered sneaker waves.  They don't seem to have a single distinct cause, but occur where physical factors such as high winds and strong currents cause waves to merge and then create a single exceptionally large wave.   Here are my little waves on the Lake Ontario Shore.

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April 23 2020 - Prickles the Sheep

The best news of the week was about the rogue Tasmanian sheep named Prickles.  She's been living rogue for 7 years, after a brush fire on the sheep farm destroyed some of the fences.  The owners hadn't realized Prickles was gone because they'd lost sheep during the bushfire.  So Prickles was sighted from afar because of her vast coat of wool.  Take a look at Prickles HERE. I don't remember the Guinness Book of Records as a child.  It was started in 1955 so I should have become familiar with them by the 1960's.  Instead, we were familiar with specific area records - sports records, music popularity charts and of course, the Oscars.  I don't remember ever looking at the Guinness Book of Records.  Now somehow I am looking up Chris, the sheep, with a similar story of being found wandering alone with a massive overgrown fleece of 41 kgs - that was in 2015. He's the record-holder.  So will Prickles win out over Chris?  Chris had a lot of wool.  He is HERE being shorn.  I find a few more stories like this:  I guess getting lost in the bushland isn't that unusual. Sheila was found in 2016 after six years in the wild.  She too had a great coat. Today's pictures are strange and interesting.  I took these quite a few years ago at the Toronto Botanical Gardens.  At the entrance is a water wall made of metal mesh that the water runs down.  It had spilled onto the sidewalk with the result being these reflections. The pictures weren't turned to black and white - this is how it looked.

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