Australia is home to some of the world’s strangest marine life, especially along its coasts and reefs. That said, much of its coastline isn’t all that unusual. There are always exceptions, of course, like this bizarre coastal sweet spot where conditions line up to produce a dramatic—and splashy—display.
First, the water spirals into a vortex, creating a circular view into the bottom of the sea. Then, the waves keep swirling until they break into a 130-foot (40-meter) pillar of saltwater. What’s perhaps most surprising is that this isn’t a one-time occurrence—it’s a recurring feature of a secret location somewhere off the Australian coast.
“The craziest wave on Earth”
These unlikely currents were captured by Chris White and Ben Allen, two members of an indie film crew based in Australia. Their claim to fame is Tension, a series of boogie-boarding movies that allegedly became “cult classics on the fringe and occasional public menaces,” according to Stab Mag.
White first captured this phenomenon nearly a decade ago during an ocean outing. The strange geometry of the waves stuck with him for a long time, and he decided to seek it out again while filming for the 11th installment of the Tension series. And there it was—the same pattern from nine years ago, repeatedly crashing and rising.
For safety reasons, they haven’t disclosed the exact location of this vortex. But a short documentary on the crew’s encounter with the waves is available here (as a heads-up, the clip includes some profanity):
“I think if you go down, it’s certain death,” White admitted to Stab Mag. “It’s funny, we just hopped off the phone with a wave engineer and he had no clue how it works. The rock shelf is stationary, it’s not going up and down, so how does it break on all sides at once, like a plunger?”
Too strange to be true—or scientific?
It’s not unheard of for nature to produce some off-putting waves, winds, etc., for reasons ranging from local geology to random tricks of the weather. But in such cases, more often than not, these are singular happenings that humans were lucky to observe at the right time.
That was also what Arnold Van Rooijen, an expert in wave dynamics at the University of Western Australia, told the crew when they showed him the footage.
“This is a pretty unique combination of the geomorphology of the reefs and the symmetry of the water depths,” Van Rooijen said. According to Ben Allen, the crew’s drone operator, Van Rooijen had expressed skepticism that the phenomenon would happen again.
“And I’m like, ‘No, I’m pretty sure we captured it happening over and over and over again,” Allen laughed. “He just didn’t believe it—and he’s meant to be one of the best oceanographers in Australia.”
“I’ve shot a lot of waves, explored, looked [at waves] so many hours in my entire life, and I’ve never seen anything remotely close to that,” White added. “Like, it’s just a spectacle.”
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