On November 17, 2020, a buoy off Vancouver Island, Canada, encountered something almost unimaginable: a rogue wave measuring 58 feet from trough to crest.

Nobody filmed the actual encounter. But an extraordinary computer simulation from MarineLabs , the company whose buoy captured the measurements, offers a frightening look at what unfolded.

In the animation, a small yellow marker represents the buoy as a wireframe ocean surface rises and falls around it. Then, around the 42-second mark, a mountainous swell surges far above its neighbors. For an instant, an otherwise rough sea looks completely out of scale.

And here’s the wild part: it wasn’t even the tallest rogue wave ever documented.

That distinction is often associated with the famous 85-foot Draupner wave, which struck an offshore oil platform near Norway in 1995. But the Ucluelet wave was different.

The surrounding sea had a significant wave height of approximately 20 feet.…