100+ foot waves suddenly irrelevant.
Post tropical cyclone Lee is, currently, slamming into America’s northeaster seaboard wreaking havoc, causing major panic. Power outages are being reported in Maine, Canadians are counting their bacon and New Hampshirites are tying themselves to granite hills, screaming “live free or die” into the howl.
Wild times.
A surf journalist, who made his way from storm-tested Southern California in order to advice and assist, is currently advising and assisting Vermontettes on how to deal with troublesome light breezes. An important role that will be greatly detailed soon.
Before that, though, it must be noted that Garrett McNamara, Laird Hamilton and other big waves studs are positively drooling over a new discovery of an “extreme” star with HUGE waves.
Dubbed MACHO 80.7443.1718, obvs, the star is some 160,000 light years away from the Earth, has 35 times the mass of the sun and once a month lots of gravitational tug, like the moon our our ocean, creates MASSIVE waves on its surface.
Up to 10 percent of the star’s entire diameter making them, roughly, 4 million kilometers high.
Astrophysicist Jim Fuller of Caltech, who was not part of the study, said it “shows how complicated and interesting the dynamics get when you have an extreme system like this.”
The waves can get big enough that they actually break and crash across the brighter star’s surface, the study suggests. When an ocean wave is far from shore, it’s a rolling, undulating wave. But as it comes closer to shore, it rises and collapses on itself. “Something kind of parallel is happening here,” Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says. The top of the wave steepens, “gets out of phase with the bottom, and it folds over on itself, and it crashes.”
The 4 million kilometer business puts to absolute shame the 100+ foot stuff normally being chased here on earth and you can be certain big wave surfers will be employing means available of reaching MACHO 80.7443.1718.
Kai Lenny’s jet ski etc.
HBO busily developing “4 Million Kilometer Wave.”
The small fishing village on the star readying itself for a bright spotlight.
Exciting days.