Rogue Waves occur when a larger wave appears in a group of smaller waves. In some circumstances these can lead to an exaggerated ‘Spike Wave’, or a crashing wave resembling the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. The Draupner wave is another example of a freak wave which occurred in the North Sea in 1995, reaching a height of almost 20m. Mark McAllister at the University of Oxford, sought to recreate the Draupner wave in the FloWave laboratory in Edinburgh to study how such waves form…

Produced by Tom Crawford. Thanks to the UK Fluids Network and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics for supporting this project.