Huge rogue waves rise from nowhere to sink ships. Can we predict them? Freak waves cause death and destruction at sea. As climate change looks set to make them more extreme, researchers are scrambling to find ways to predict when and where these killers will strike

“For God’s sake, hold on! It’s got us!” When explorer Ernest Shackleton uttered these words in Antarctica in 1916, his ship Endurance had already been crushed by ice and sunk. Desperately rowing to the island of South Georgia with a small crew, Shackleton spotted another disaster heading their way: an enormous wave.

Giant waves that rise up out of nowhere and wreak havoc at sea were once dismissed as fiction. We now know they are surprisingly common, as our understanding of the forces that create these freaks has become clearer. Given the complex patterns of waves across the vast reaches of the seas, making accurate forecasts is no simple task. Still, the need for such predictions may be getting more urgent; as climate change intensifies weather systems, we may see even more of these ocean monsters.