Moreover, a sudden shallowing of the seabed in the region—it goes from thirteen hundred feet deep to barely three hundred—combines with the other brute forces to generate waves of frightening magnitude. These “Cape Horn rollers” can dwarf a ninety-foot mast. Floating on some of these waves are lethal bergs cleaved from pack ice. And the collision of cold fronts from the Antarctic and warm fronts from near the equator produce an endless cycle of rain and fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning.
