24 meters high, or about the size of an eight-storey building, the wave that crashed off the coast of New Zealand on 8 May 2018 was not only huge, it was the biggest wave ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. Just that.
While a violent storm was raging near Campbell Island, about 700 km south of New Zealand, a buoy recorded this exceptional wave. According to a press release from MetOcean Solutions, it is very likely that even larger waves formed without being recorded by the buoy during the gust.
Set up in March 2018 to measure the extreme conditions of the Southern Ocean, the buoy only records once every 3 hours. In any case, the wave was big enough to beat the previous Southern Hemisphere record, which was 22 meters.
