Scientists finally managed to capture wave 'thought to only happen once every 10,000 years'

Giant waves the size of ten storey buildings used to be considered myths, but research has found that they were actually they are a lot more common than once thought.

These ‘rogue’ waves come suddenly and severely, causing widespread damage and can crash onto shores, as well as taking stunned beachgoers back into the sea with them.

With more than 200 supertankers and container ships sunk in the last two decades, rogue waves are believed to be the cause - although, it was believed they only occurred every 10,000 years.

Those who manage to survive come back with the craziest stories of waves that reach the sky, such as the case in 1995, when the cruiser liner Queen Elizabeth II was met with a 29-metre high rogue wave.

Captain Ronald Warwick at the time called it ‘a great wall of water… it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover.’

Giant 'rogue waves' were thought to be mythical. Lety Lorenzo / 500px / Getty Images

And in 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and Caledonian Star, were pummelled by 30-metre waves in the South Atlantic which left its bridge windows smashed.

Wolfgang Rosenthal - Senior Scientist with the GKSS Forschungszentrum GmbH research centre has studied rogue waves for years and commented on the incident as per the European Space Agency: "The incidents occurred less than a thousand kilometres apart from each other.

"All the electronics were switched off on the Bremen as they drifted parallel to the waves, and until they were turned on again the crew were thinking it could have been their last day alive.

"The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels: two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."

With so many more examples available to prove that these waves needed to be monitored, the European Union initiated a project called MaxWave in 2000 to figure out how widespread rogue waves are, how they happen and what this means for fortifying ships against them.

Using data from ESA's ERS radar satellites, it found that there were more than ten individual giant waves around the globe above 25 metres in height between the launch of ESA's twin spacecraft ERS-1 and 2 in July 1991 and April 1995.

ERS satellites manged to capture 10 within a couple of months. Merten Snijders / Getty Images

Utilising SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar), it acquired 10 by 5 km 'imagettes' of the sea surface every 200 km when in ‘wave mode’.

Rosenthal said: "The raw imagettes are not made available, but with their resolution of ten metres we believed they contained a wealth of useful information by themselves.

"Ocean wave spectra provide mean sea state data but imagettes depict the individual wave heights including the extremes we were interested in.

He added: "Having proved they existed, in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecasted.

"MaxWave formally concluded at the end of last year although two lines of work are carrying on from it – one is to improve ship design by learning how ships are sunk, and the other is to examine more satellite data with a view to analysing if forecasting is possible."

Meanwhile, another project called WaveAtlas used two years of the ERS imagettes to create a worldwide guide to map out rogue wave events and continue its analyses until 2005.

"We know some of the reasons for the rogue waves, but we do not know them all." Rosenthal said.