Lifeboat Foundation

For nearly 200 years, Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa has inspired wonder partly because the event it depicts, a towering freak wave, has defied scientific explanation.

Now, a team at Oxford and Edinburgh universities claim to have laid the mystery to rest by successfully creating one for themselves — and it looks remarkably similar.

The achievement is being hailed as a significant breakthrough because, so far, meteorologists and sailors have had no means of predicting the likelihood of violent waves that are unexpectedly large compared to their surroundings.