The ocean doesn’t look angry at first on a gray morning off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal. It seems busy. From the horizon, swells come in like dark, moving hills, each one a little taller than the last. Surfers float like tiny dots on the surface, watching and waiting. Tourists on the cliff above press their phones to the wind and gasp in unison.
After that, it goes up.
A wall of water rises out of nowhere, 35 meters high, blocking the sky behind the surfer who has somehow decided that this is a good idea. Parents in a coastal village far away from here check tide charts on their phones and spend a second too long looking at the word “swell.” One side says it’s a natural wonder. The other one says it’s a warning.
Both are correct.
When a “scientific wonder” looks like the end of the world
If you stand next to an oceanographer at the end of a stormy pier, you’ll hear a different language. They talk about how long waves last, how far they can go, and how likely it is that a rogue wave will happen. When the buoys pick up a 35-meter monster out at sea, their eyes light up. For them, it’s like nature giving them a once-in-a-lifetime experiment.
That same piece of information is not interesting to the woman whose house is six meters above sea level. It’s a countdown.
These huge waves are now famous in the news. Viral drone videos, slow-motion wipeouts, and rides that break records. Scientists call them “extreme events,” “valuable for modeling,” and “critical to understanding future climate scenarios.” People who live on the coast hear something completely different: “We’re studying it” can sound a lot like “You’re on your own.” When your front yard is becoming a saltwater pond, it’s weird to be excited about school.
People in small towns in western Ireland, like Doonbeg and Lahinch, remember the winter of 2013–2014. The coast was hit by storm after storm. Waves crashed right over two-story sea walls, throwing boulders the size of cars onto roads and into gardens. One night, a single freak wave broke through the window of a café on the beach and threw tables across the room like toys.
Local news called it “the worst winter in decades.” Later, research papers called it a “remarkable natural laboratory.” Those words are real, but they don’t exist in the same world. The owner of the café had to serve tea from a food truck for months while they waited for insurance. She didn’t think of the lab as a place to go. It was the room where she lived.
In this story, scientists aren’t bad guys. They are often the first to warn that coastlines are changing quickly. The way the story is told is still important. If you say in a TV interview that a 35-meter wave is “beautifully energetic,” you might make a lot of people angry who didn’t expect it. People who already have eroding dunes and flooded basements hear a kind of emotional mismatch.
This is where trust begins to break down. When the same scary pictures are framed as great content for social media, a voice inside you quietly asks, “Whose ocean is this, really?”
How to live with a rising sea: between awe and warning
You don’t need a PhD to read the water if you live near the shore. You can tell that storms feel different now than they did twenty years ago. The wind is stronger, and the waves rise a little higher on the promenade. One real, useful thing you can do is make your own “wave diary” long before the experts get there.
Every big storm, take pictures from the same place. Write down the height of the tide, the direction of the wind, and whether the street or just the sidewalk flooded. Ask older neighbors where the water used to go “back then.” This homemade record, along with public tide data, often shows risk more clearly than a well-made government brochure.
To be honest, no one really does this every day. But families who pay attention early are often the ones who leave calmly, not in a panic, when the big one comes.
There is real emotional work going on here. You’re not just “adapting” to climate risk; you’re sad about small losses as they happen. The dune where you played as a kid is now half gone. The road to the beach was closed more often. We’ve all had that moment when we realized that the place where we grew up might not be safe for our kids.
A common mistake is to go back and forth between denial and doom. One extreme is to ignore every warning until your ground floor floods. The other is spending nights scrolling through the worst-case scenarios until you can’t feel anything. The middle path is boring, but it works. Join local coastal groups, read the minutes of council meetings, and find out what makes a 10-year storm different from a 100-year storm.
You don’t have to become an amateur climatologist; you just need to know a few important numbers: your elevation, how far you are from the shore, and your flood history. After that, the choices get easier: raise the power lines, put valuable things higher up, push for higher roads, or, in some cases, quietly start planning a move while you still can.
Scientists are starting to talk about these waves in a different way, which is good. A few people admit they got the tone wrong. The change is small but strong when done right.
Lara Mendes, a coastal engineer, says, “From a physics point of view, a 35-meter wave is breathtaking.” “But I’ve learned that if I call it beautiful in front of a lot of people who just lost their seawall, they won’t listen to me. Now I say, “This is what your grandchildren will have to deal with more often unless we all work together.”
The experts who bring numbers and humility to community meetings are the ones who are most respected. They turn jargon into everyday language and give you real choices instead of just ideas. That usually means saying in plain language what can be saved and what can’t.
- When asking for data, say “What does this mean for our street, this port, this village?”
- Ask for both the “worst-case” and “most-likely” scenarios. A lot of plans make things less scary to avoid panic.
- Push for deadlines you can see, like “In five years, you’ll see X; in twenty years, Y will be normal.”
- Be clear about who is responsible for what—who pays when the sea wall breaks? When do you decide to pull back?
- Write down every promise. Words of comfort fade, but written promises shape budgets.
Why the same wave can lead to three different futures
That 35-meter wave off the coast isn’t just water and wind. It’s a mirror. For the big-wave surfer, it’s a goal in life. The researcher has been waiting ten years to get this data. For the family living in the low-lying bungalow, it’s a sign of what might happen in thirty years when the dunes come. One event, three different emotional worlds.
When news organizations put those amazing pictures on their front pages, they are tapping into something deep inside us: our fascination with being small in front of something big. The key for all of us is not to stop feeling awe, but to make the picture bigger so that fear and fairness can also be seen. A wave can be both amazing and very unfair in who it hurts.
There is already a quiet change in culture happening. Young people who live near the coast are becoming citizen scientists by using cheap sensors and shared spreadsheets. Some surfers are becoming safety advocates by posting not only videos of big waves but also information about how to get out of the water, how to avoid rip currents, and how to get to safety. Local councils are starting to realize that glossy brochures can’t compete with real-life experience.
The question isn’t whether scientists should be happy about natural wonders like 35-meter waves. The question is who gets to go to that party and who really gets protected when it spreads inland. The next time you see a viral video of a tower of water falling down in a shower of glitter, you might feel both excited and a little uneasy.
That tension will decide what happens to our coasts in the future.
| Main point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Colossal waves are both amazing and scary. | Waves that are 35 meters high excite scientists and scare people who live at sea level. | Helps you read news stories with a more critical and realistic eye |
| Local knowledge is just as important as models. | “Wave diaries” and community memory often show real risk faster than reports. | Gives you an easy way to see what will happen to your own coastline in the future |
| Ask for clear, useful communication | Get local information, timelines, and written responsibilities from experts. | Makes vague talk about climate change into real choices for your family and home |
Frequently Asked Questions:
Are 35-meter waves becoming more common because of climate change?
Some data shows that extreme waves may happen more often in some places as storm tracks and wind patterns change. However, this isn’t true everywhere. It’s clear that even “rare” giants are more dangerous when the sea level is higher and the coasts are already eroding.
Question 2: Should I leave if I live near the water?
Not all the time. Check your elevation, flood history, and local adaptation plans first. If you keep getting flooded or there aren’t any long-term protections in place, it might be a good idea to quietly plan your options over the next 5 to 20 years instead of waiting for a crisis.
Question 3: Why do scientists seem so excited about waves that are dangerous?
For them, extreme waves are rare chances to test models and learn how oceans act as the world warms. When you’re in danger, that excitement can sound tone-deaf. That’s why many people are rethinking how they talk about “beautiful” storms.”
Question 4: Can waves this big hit beaches directly?
The biggest monsters, which are usually 30 to 35 meters long, form over deep water and get shorter as they move toward the shore. Even “smaller” waves of 8 to 12 meters can cause serious flooding, damage to buildings, and erosion of the coast when they are combined with high tides and storm surge.
Question 5: What’s one easy thing I can do this year?
Find your house on a local flood or storm-surge map, and then ask your council what the plans are for your part of the coast over the next 10 and 50 years. That one talk can change how you feel about every “spectacular” storm video” that shows up in your feed.
