57.5° N, 12.7° W 175 MILES OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND FEBRUARY 8, 2000 The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean''s terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality--or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave ''s deep trough, it heeled twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incom- ing seas. What chance did they have, the forty-seven scientists and crew aboard this research cruise gone horribly wrong? A series of storms had trapped them in the black void east of Rockall, a volcanic island nick- named Waveland for the nastiness of its surrounding waters. More than a thousand wrecked ships lay on the seafloor below.

Captain Keith Avery steered his vessel directly into the onslaught, just as he ''d been doing for the past five days. While weather like this was common in the cranky North Atlantic, these giant waves were unlike anything he ''d encountered in his thirty years of experience. And worse, they kept rearing up from different directions. Flanking all sides of the 295-foot ship, the crew kept a constant watch to make sure they weren''t about to be sucker punched by a wave that was sneaking up from behind, or from the sides. No one wanted to be out here right now, but Avery knew their only hope was to remain where they were, with their bow pointed into the waves. Turning around was too risky; if one of these waves caught Discovery broadside, there would be long odds on survival. It takes thirty tons per square meter of force to dent a ship. A breaking hundred-foot wave packs one hundred tons of force per square meter and can tear a ship in half.

Above all, Avery had to position Discovery so that it rode over these crests and wasn''t crushed beneath them. He stood barefoot at the helm, the only way he could maintain trac- tion after a refrigerator toppled over, splashing out a slick of milk, juice, and broken glass (no time to clean it up--the waves just kept coming). Up on the bridge everything was amplified, all the night noises and motions, the slamming and the crashing, the elevator-shaft plunges into the troughs, the frantic wind, the swaying and groaning of the ship; and now, as the waves suddenly grew even bigger and meaner and steeper, Avery heard a loud bang coming from Discovery ''s foredeck. He squinted in the dark to see that the fifty-man lifeboat had partially ripped from its two-inch-thick steel cleats and was pounding against the hull. Below deck, computers and furniture had been smashed into pieces. The scientists huddled in their cabins nursing bruises, black eyes, and broken ribs. Attempts at rest were pointless. They heard the noises too; they rode the free falls and the sickening barrel rolls; and they worried about the fact that a six-foot-long window next to their lab had already shattered from the twisting.

Discovery was almost forty years old, and recently she ''d undergone major surgery. The ship had been cut in half, lengthened by thirty-three feet, and then welded back together. Would the joints hold? No one really knew. No one had ever been in conditions like these. One of the two chief scientists, Penny Holliday, watched as a chair skidded out from under her desk, swung into the air, and crashed onto her bunk. Holliday, fine boned, porcelain-doll pretty, and as tough as any man on board the ship, had sent an e-mail to her boyfriend, Craig Harris, earlier in the day. "This isn''t funny anymore," she wrote. "The ocean just looks completely out of control.

" So much white spray was whipping off the waves that she had the strange impression of being in a blizzard. This was Waveland all right, an otherworldly place of constant motion that took you nowhere but up and down; where there was no sleep, no comfort, no connection to land, and where human eyes and stomachs struggled to adapt, and failed. Ten days ago Discovery had left port in Southampton, England, on what Holliday had hoped would be a typical three-week trip to Iceland and back (punctuated by a little seasickness perhaps, but nothing major). Along the way they''d stop and sample the water for salinity, temperature, oxygen, and other nutrients. From these tests the scientists would draw a picture of what was happening out there, how the ocean''s basic character- istics were shifting, and why. These are not small questions on a planet that is 71 percent covered in salt water. As the Earth''s climate changes--as the inner atmosphere becomes warmer, as the winds increase, as the oceans heat up--what does all this mean for us? Trouble, most likely, and Holliday and her colleagues were in the business of finding out how much and what kind. It was deeply frustrating for them to be lashed to their bunks rather than out on the deck lowering their instruments.

No one was thinking about Iceland anymore. The trip was far from a loss, however. During the endless trains of massive waves, Discovery itself was collecting data that would lead to a chilling revelation. The ship was ringed with instruments; everything that happened out there was being precisely measured, the sea''s fury captured in tight graphs and unassailable numbers. Months later, long after Avery had returned everyone safely to the Southampton docks, when Holliday began to analyze these figures, she would discover that the waves they had experienced were the largest ever scientifically recorded in the open ocean. The significant wave height, an average of the largest 33 percent of the waves, was sixty-one feet, with frequent spikes far beyond that. At the same time, none of the state-of-the-art weather forecasts and wave models--the information upon which all ships, oil rigs, fisheries, and passenger boats rely--had predicted these behemoths. In other words, under this particular set of weather conditions, waves this size should not have existed.

And yet they did. History is full of eyewitness accounts of giant waves, monsters in the hundred-foot range and beyond, but until very recently scientists dis- missed them. The problem was this: according to the basic physics of ocean waves, the conditions that would produce a hundred-footer were so far beyond rare as to virtually never happen. Anyone who claimed to have seen one, therefore, was engaging in nautical tall tales or outright lies. Still, it was hard to discount a report from the polar hero Ernest Shackleton, hardly the type for hysterical exaggeration. On his crossing from Antarctica to South Georgia Island in April 1916, Shackleton noticed odd movements in the night sky. "A moment later, I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds, but the white crest of an enor- mous wave," he wrote. "During 26 years experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic.

It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days." When the wave hit his ship, Shackleton and his crew were "flung forward like a cork," and the boat flooded. Fast bailing and major luck were all that saved them from capsizing. "Earnestly we hoped that never again would we encounter such a wave." The men on the 850-foot cargo ship München would have seconded that, if any of them had survived their rendezvous with a similar wave on December 12, 1978. Considered unsinkable, the München was a cutting- edge craft, the flagship of the German Merchant Navy. At 3:25 a.m.

frag- ments of a Morse code Mayday, emanating from 450 miles north of the Azores, signaled that the vessel had suffered grave damage from a wave. But even after 110 ships and 13 aircraft were deployed--the most com- prehensive search in the history of shipping--the ship and its twenty- seven crew were never seen again. A haunting clue was left behind: searchers found one of the München ''s lifeboats, usually stowed sixty-five feet above the water, floating empty. Its twisted metal fittings indicated that it had been torn away. "Something extraordinary" had destroyed the ship, concluded the official report. The München ''s disappearance points to the main problem with proving the existence of a giant wave: if you run into that kind of night- mare, it ''s likely to be the last one you''ll have. The force of waves is hard to overstate. An eighteen-inch wave can topple a wall built to withstand 125-mile-per-hour winds, for instance, and coastal advisories are issued for even five-foot-tall surf, which regularly kills people caught in the wrong places.

The number of people who have witnessed a hundred-foot wave at close range and made it back home to describe the experience is a very small one. Even if a ship does manage to survive a hundred-foot wall of water, there are no underwhelmed survivors. Big fish tales are human nature. Add to that a dose of mortal terror, honest confusion, a fear of being blamed for damage to the ship--if, say, the wave didn''t quite measure up to the "something extraordinary" test but managed to poleax the vessel anyway because the captain was below deck playing darts and drinking vodka at the time--and what you''ve got is less than the scientifically immaculate truth. But there was a rare occasion in 1933, when a sharp-eyed naval offi- cer aboard the 478-foot oil carrier USS Ramapo happened to.