Australia’s oceans are doing something that seems either apocalyptic or magical: waves are repeatedly spiraling into a circular vortex before exploding into a towering, 130-foot column of seawater. It’s almost like Poseidon himself is summoning a waterspout.
The phenomenon was documented by Chris White and Ben Allen, members of an Australian indie surf-film crew that previously worked on a cult body-boarding series called Tension. White first encountered the wave nearly a decade ago and hasn’t stopped thinking about its impossible existence since.
While filming the 11th installment of the tension series, the crew returned to the same spot where they had found these frightening water columns, and it just kept happening again and again and again.
Footage shows water rotating inward like a mouth in the sea that’s rapidly closing shut. It reveals a clear view down to the seafloor, then surges upward and collapses in all directions, causing what appears to be a massive explosion that propels a thick column of seawater hundreds of feet into the air.
Scientists Are Puzzled by a Wave Vortex Along Australia’s Coast
According to White, falling into it would almost certainly be fatal. Even experienced wave engineers don’t know what to make of it. One expert told White he couldn’t explain how a stationary rock shelf could cause waves to break simultaneously from every side.
Even academics who study wave dynamics are left scratching their head when they see footage of this phenomenon in action. One such wave-dynamics expert who spoke to the documentary crew, Arnold Van Rooijen of the University of Western Australia, suggested the effect was likely due to an exact alignment between reef geomorphology and water depth.
He initially thought it was a rare, one-off event until the crew insisted they had captured the wave happening several times under similar conditions and at different points in time. Nature does weird stuff all the time, but most of that weird stuff is usually a one-off event caused by a confluence of factors that will likely never come together in that exact way ever again. At least not while anyone’s observing it.
What makes this wave different is its consistency. It’s following a repeatable script, yet for as long as it’s been running, no one has yet understood exactly what’s going on with that script. What’s the recipe making this phenomenon possible in the first place?
We don’t know, and the only people in the world who seem to be physically noticing it are a group of bodyboarding documentarians.
The post Australia’s Ocean Glitch Is a Weird Wave Vortex Nobody Can Fully Explain appeared first on VICE.
