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The Great Wave

Created by
@FlavioAcri
Collection
Owned by
@FlavioAcri

Description

The Draupner wave, observed at 3:00 p.m. on New Year's Day in 1995 on the deck of the Norwegian Draupner oil platform, was the first scientific evidence of a rare rogue wave. Those waves are very rare, they appear suddenly and measure at least twice as tall as the surrounding waves. These fleeting, colossal phenomena are thought to be the possible cause for the still-unexplained sinking of ships in the open ocean.

Researchers at university of Oxford, recently managed to recreate the Draupner wave in a simulation pool. It was only after recreating this wave that they saw the similarity with the well-known woodblock print "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" from the early 1830s by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

Equally, as soon as I took this photo of the Goju-no-to Pagoda in Miyajima (Hiroshima, Japan), I was amazed by how of the edges of this beautiful building resembled to this famous print and by how, behind, the sky was astonishingly mimicking the powerful whirls of a wave.

Provenance